What do chief executives do all day?
It really is what it seems: They spend about a third of their work time in meetings.
That is one of the central findings of a team of scholars from London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, who have burrowed into the day-to-day schedules of more than 500 CEOs from around the world with hopes of determining exactly how they organize their time—and how that affects the performance and management of their firms.
Their study—known as the Executive Time Use Project—incorporates time logs kept by CEOs' personal assistants, who tracked activities lasting more than 15 minutes during a single week selected by the researchers. The project, which is ongoing, so far has collected data from three different studies of CEOs from around the world.
In one sample of 65 CEOs, executives spent roughly 18 hours of a 55-hour workweek in meetings, more than three hours on calls and five hours in business meals, on average. Some of the remaining time was spent traveling, in personal activity, such as exercise or lunches with spouses, or in short activities, such as quick calls, that weren't recorded by CEOs' assistants. Working alone averaged just six hours weekly.
The more direct reports a CEO had correlated with more, and longer, internal meetings, the researchers found. Rather than foisting off responsibilities to other managers, CEOs with more direct reports may be more hands-on and involved in internal operations, they said.
But not all direct reports are equal. In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs' time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average, the researchers found.
Even if a CEO has a lot of direct reports, "the effect of the CFO or COO is stronger," and may help reduce a CEO's time spent in internal meetings, says Harvard Business School's Raffaella Sadun, a co-author of the project. The other researchers were Oriana Bandiera and Andrea Prat, of the London School of Economics and Julie Wulf of Harvard Business School. Their preliminary findings were just published in a Harvard Business School paper.
The researchers said they weren't surprised by the amount of time spent in meetings, since one of the roles of a CEO is to manage employees and meet with customers and consultants.
A busy meeting schedule—often conducted virtually in global companies—can indicate that executives are engaged with their companies and close to their managers and clients. Still, CEOs say they pine for more solo time to think and strategize.
Rory Cowan, CEO of Lionbridge Technologies Inc., a Waltham, Mass., technology-services firm with about 4,500 employees, says he is constantly communicating with staff and clients. "I don't know when I'm not in a meeting," he says.
Instead of spending a lot of time in long face-to-face meetings, however, Mr. Cowan spends more time "doing frequent iterative touches," either in person or via text messages, instant messaging and video chat—sometimes with "four or five windows open concurrently."
As a result, his meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes, he says.
Lars Dalgaard, CEO of SuccessFactors Inc., a human resources software firm, says he spends about a third of his work time, at most, in formal meetings.
"While you are sitting in a meeting, your competition is getting stuff done," he says. (Software firm SAP AG recently announced that it was acquiring SuccessFactors.)
NV "Tiger" Tyagarajan, president and CEO of Genpact Ltd., a technology-management firm, recently analyzed his time use to make sure he was spending enough time meeting with clients. He determined he was. But he does wish for more time to "sit back and think," he says, or simply to bounce around ideas "without a fixed meeting or a fixed agenda."
Mr. Dalgaard says he tries to dedicate as much as 25% of his week to thinking by making time on flights or blocking out time on his schedule—occasionally retreating to a quiet room or driving on the highway to let ideas crystallize.
Likewise, Mr. Cowan says that he tries to "build a big fence" around his first work hour in the morning at 7 a.m. to clear his thoughts, catch up on reading and manage email.
In contrast, Jon Oringer, CEO of New York based stock-photo provider Shutterstock Images LLC, doesn't seem to lack "alone time." He is rarely on the phone and averages about three meetings a day mostly lasting about 30 minutes, with some going up to 90 minutes.
The rest of the time he is usually scoping out his competition on blogs like TechCrunch, monitoring Web traffic and Twitter feeds and working on his own pet projects.
He is in the office from about 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., but says he works a lot from home, even during weekends.
"It doesn't feel like I work when I'm working," Mr. Oringer said. "It's my thing."
Executives' assessment of how they spent their time differed from the actual records, as noted by their calendars and personal assistants, researchers found.
When top executives compare their top priorities to their time use, "they are usually surprised about the mismatch," says Robert Steven Kaplan, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
He recommends executives substitute the word 'money' for 'time' when deciding how to schedule their week. "With money... you'd be more careful and judicious about it. If someone asked you for some, you'd be more likely to say no," says Mr. Kaplan.
The researchers' global study involved both private and public companies from many countries; they didn't determine whether executive time use correlated with a firm's performance.
In another sample of 94 Italian CEOs, the researchers found that the way an executive budgets his or her time strongly correlated with a firm's profitability and productivity, measured as revenue per employee.
In the Italian sample, the key to a company's performance was with whom CEOs met. Meeting with external figures didn't help a firm's productivity, they found. Better performance came from more internal meetings, they found.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/where-s-the-boss--trapped-in-a-meeting.html
2/2/12
The 8 Things Your Employees Need Most
Forget about raises and better benefits. Those are important -- but this is what your staff really wants.
Pay is important. But pay only goes so far.
Getting a raise is like buying a bigger house; soon, more becomes the new normal.
Higher wages won’t cause employees to automatically perform at a higher level. Commitment, work ethic, and motivation are not based on pay.
To truly care about your business, your employees need these eight things—and they need them from you:
1. Freedom. Best practices can create excellence, but every task doesn't deserve a best practice or a micro-managed approach. (Yes, even you, fast food industry.)
Autonomy and latitude breed engagement and satisfaction. Latitude also breeds innovation. Even manufacturing and heavily process-oriented positions have room for different approaches.
Whenever possible, give your employees the freedom to work they way they work best.
2. Targets. Goals are fun. Everyone—yes, even you—is at least a little competitive, if only with themselves. Targets create a sense of purpose and add a little meaning to even the most repetitive tasks.
Without a goal to shoot for, work is just work. And work sucks.
3. Mission. We all like to feel a part of something bigger. Striving to be worthy of words like "best" or "largest" or "fastest" or "highest quality" provides a sense of purpose.
Let employees know what you want to achieve, for your business, for customers, and even your community. And if you can, let them create a few missions of their own.
Caring starts with knowing what to care about—and why.
4. Expectations. While every job should include some degree of latitude, every job needs basic expectations regarding the way specific situations should be handled. Criticize an employee for expediting shipping today, even though last week that was the standard procedure if on-time delivery was in jeopardy, and you lose that employee.
Few things are more stressful than not knowing what your boss expects from one minute to the next.
When standards change make sure you communicate those changes first. When you can't, explain why this particular situation is different, and why you made the decision you made.
5. Input. Everyone wants to offer suggestions and ideas. Deny employees the opportunity to make suggestions, or shoot their ideas down without consideration, and you create robots.
Robots don't care.
Make it easy for employees to offer suggestions. When an idea doesn't have merit, take the time to explain why. You can't implement every idea, but you can always make employees feel valued for their ideas.
6. Connection. Employees don’t want to work for a paycheck; they want to work with and for people.
A kind word, a short discussion about family, a brief check-in to see if they need anything... those individual moments are much more important than meetings or formal evaluations.
7. Consistency. Most people can deal with a boss who is demanding and quick to criticize... as long as he or she treats every employee the same. (Think of it as the Tom Coughlin effect.)
While you should treat each employee differently, you must treat each employee fairly. (There's a big difference.)
The key to maintaining consistency is to communicate. The more employees understand why a decision was made the less likely they are to assume favoritism or unfair treatment.
8. Future. Every job should have the potential to lead to something more, either within or outside your company.
For example, I worked at a manufacturing plant while I was in college. I had no real future with the company. Everyone understood I would only be there until I graduated.
One day my boss said, "Let me show you how we set up our production board."
I raised an eyebrow; why show me? He said, "Even though it won’t be here, some day, somewhere, you'll be in charge of production. You might as well start learning now."
Take the time to develop employees for jobs they someday hope to fill—even if those positions are outside your company. (How will you know what they hope to do? Try asking.)
Employees will care about your business when you care about them first.
Pay is important. But pay only goes so far.
Getting a raise is like buying a bigger house; soon, more becomes the new normal.
Higher wages won’t cause employees to automatically perform at a higher level. Commitment, work ethic, and motivation are not based on pay.
To truly care about your business, your employees need these eight things—and they need them from you:
1. Freedom. Best practices can create excellence, but every task doesn't deserve a best practice or a micro-managed approach. (Yes, even you, fast food industry.)
Autonomy and latitude breed engagement and satisfaction. Latitude also breeds innovation. Even manufacturing and heavily process-oriented positions have room for different approaches.
Whenever possible, give your employees the freedom to work they way they work best.
2. Targets. Goals are fun. Everyone—yes, even you—is at least a little competitive, if only with themselves. Targets create a sense of purpose and add a little meaning to even the most repetitive tasks.
Without a goal to shoot for, work is just work. And work sucks.
3. Mission. We all like to feel a part of something bigger. Striving to be worthy of words like "best" or "largest" or "fastest" or "highest quality" provides a sense of purpose.
Let employees know what you want to achieve, for your business, for customers, and even your community. And if you can, let them create a few missions of their own.
Caring starts with knowing what to care about—and why.
4. Expectations. While every job should include some degree of latitude, every job needs basic expectations regarding the way specific situations should be handled. Criticize an employee for expediting shipping today, even though last week that was the standard procedure if on-time delivery was in jeopardy, and you lose that employee.
Few things are more stressful than not knowing what your boss expects from one minute to the next.
When standards change make sure you communicate those changes first. When you can't, explain why this particular situation is different, and why you made the decision you made.
5. Input. Everyone wants to offer suggestions and ideas. Deny employees the opportunity to make suggestions, or shoot their ideas down without consideration, and you create robots.
Robots don't care.
Make it easy for employees to offer suggestions. When an idea doesn't have merit, take the time to explain why. You can't implement every idea, but you can always make employees feel valued for their ideas.
6. Connection. Employees don’t want to work for a paycheck; they want to work with and for people.
A kind word, a short discussion about family, a brief check-in to see if they need anything... those individual moments are much more important than meetings or formal evaluations.
7. Consistency. Most people can deal with a boss who is demanding and quick to criticize... as long as he or she treats every employee the same. (Think of it as the Tom Coughlin effect.)
While you should treat each employee differently, you must treat each employee fairly. (There's a big difference.)
The key to maintaining consistency is to communicate. The more employees understand why a decision was made the less likely they are to assume favoritism or unfair treatment.
8. Future. Every job should have the potential to lead to something more, either within or outside your company.
For example, I worked at a manufacturing plant while I was in college. I had no real future with the company. Everyone understood I would only be there until I graduated.
One day my boss said, "Let me show you how we set up our production board."
I raised an eyebrow; why show me? He said, "Even though it won’t be here, some day, somewhere, you'll be in charge of production. You might as well start learning now."
Take the time to develop employees for jobs they someday hope to fill—even if those positions are outside your company. (How will you know what they hope to do? Try asking.)
Employees will care about your business when you care about them first.
10 Steps to Teaching Your Kids to Become Entrepreneurs
What business owner doesn’t wish similar entrepreneurial success for their children, whether they have hopes to pass on the family business one day or can see their child creating their own. Duane Spires, a national motivational speaker and the CEO of Extreme Youth Sports (EYS) in Tampa hosts after school programs and summer camps that teach children ages five and up how to become leaders, develop confidence, and learn how to create successful lives through sports training and entrepreneurial education. Here are his steps to teaching your children to become budding entrepreneurs.
1. Goal setting is vital for future success
Teaching your children how to set and accomplish their goals is a fun and exciting activity! Did you know that written goals are over 80 percent more likely to be achieved? Imagine the possibilities!
How to teach: Ask your children to define and write down their top 10 goals and then choose the one goal that would make the biggest positive impact in their life. That goal should be their main focus. Next, write down the steps necessary to accomplish this exciting goal and encourage them to start taking action on those steps immediately.
2. Kids must learn how to recognize opportunities
Many people never meet their full potential because they fail to recognize opportunity. Teaching your children to seek out opportunities and take action on them, will directly contribute to their level of future success.
How to teach: Praise your children for pointing out small problems or setbacks in their lives that cause them distress such as: soggy sandwiches at lunchtime or not being able to reach items on a high shelf. Brainstorm solutions on how to resolve their troubles. This will teach them to focus on creating positive solutions, instead of focusing on the problem itself. This habit will allow them to create profitable ideas in their future businesses.
3. Selling is involved in every part of life
This one ability will last a lifetime because it is applied to all types of businesses and careers. From selling products and services to customers, to raising capital from investors, this skill is vital to the success of any business.
How to teach: Encourage your children to start with small projects like selling their old toys, starting a lemonade stand, or selling handmade goods. Let them price their products, sell to customers, and facilitate the transactions when sales are made.
4. Financial literacy is a must
This is one area that we all could use help with. Teaching children about money at an early age will instill a financial foundation that schools often fail to teach.
How to teach: Give your children the opportunity to earn their own money through chores, their own small business, and helping you in your business. Teach them about paying themselves first and then giving back. Educate them about investing and how their money could be used to create more money in the future. Help them set up a bank account and learn about how to budget their income.
5. Inspiring creativity will build marketing skills
Teaching kids about marketing is a great way to prepare them to attract customers to their future business. As you know, without customers, even the greatest business will fail. This is a very beneficial skill to learn while young.
How to teach: Motivate your children to start observing marketing materials like billboards, promotional banners in front of businesses, printed advertisements in magazines, and television/radio commercials. Ask them what catches their attention about the message and also quiz them on how to identify things like: the headline, subheadline, and “call to action.” Encourage them to create their own marketing materials for their business ideas.
6. Schools are wrong about FAILURE
In school we were all taught that failure is bad. In the entrepreneurial arena, failure can be a great thing if a positive lesson is learned. Napoleon Hill, author of Think And Grow Rich, states that, “Every failure carries with it a seed of equal or greater benefit.”
Allowing your children to fail will force them to create new ways to accomplish their goals and learn from their mistakes. This will lead to confident children who know how to persevere when times are tough.
How to teach: This lesson is simple. When your children fail, don’t punish, but instead discuss what factors lead to the failure and brainstorm ways to prevent it from happening again in the future. Always seek to find the “learning lesson” in each adversity and encourage your children to NEVER give up.
7. Effective communication improves all relationships
Most children today are terrible at face-to-face and telephone communication because of the popularity of social media and text messaging. Successful businesses require that people actually speak to one another. Teaching your children to communicate effectively will provide them with the winning edge in business and in their personal relationships.
How to teach: First, lead by example. Teach your children to be polite and respectful. Most importantly, practice maintaining eye contact when speaking in person. When using the telephone, teach your children to speak slowly and clearly. A bonus activity would be to practice communicating to your children with e-mails. Do not allow them to abbreviate words and phrases, but instead, write grammatically correct sentences that flow together and convey a complete message.
8. The art of giving back creates happiness
Why start a business if it doesn’t support a greater cause? It is important for your children to develop the characteristic of helping others. This attribute will allow your children to stay humble during periods of great success and it will give them the insight that a successful business provides benefits to more than just it’s owner. People that contribute to the success of others live happy and content lives.
How to teach: When brainstorming business ideas with your children, ask them to choose a charity or special cause to support with a portion of the income that they generate. Explain the concept that all great businesses contribute to improving the lives of other people.
9. Independence creates confidence
Wouldn’t you love to have independent and successful children? Of course! The entrepreneurial mindset causes kids to depend on themselves for their own success, which leads to well-rounded adults and future leaders.
How to teach: The next time your children ask for money to buy their favorite toy, this is your opportunity to ask them to brainstorm ways to create the money through entrepreneurship. This will inspire creative thinking and it will cause the entrepreneurial juices to flow.
10. Get the advantage by becoming a leader now
Children are taught in school to go with the flow and follow the rules. They are programmed to learn and memorize facts instead of becoming independent thinkers. Entrepreneurship forces children to think “outside of the box,” create unique solutions, and lead others. This will make your children leaders at an early age, and it will result in more income, opportunities, and self-confidence, in their lives.
How to teach: Give your children the opportunity to lead their friends in fun activities such as: Outdoor sports, book clubs, music practice, and small business projects. You can also encourage them to propose toasts and small speeches at family dinners and birthday parties to give them experience in public speaking!
http://www.inc.com/ss/duane-squires/10-steps-teaching-your-kids-become-entrepreneurs
1. Goal setting is vital for future success
Teaching your children how to set and accomplish their goals is a fun and exciting activity! Did you know that written goals are over 80 percent more likely to be achieved? Imagine the possibilities!
How to teach: Ask your children to define and write down their top 10 goals and then choose the one goal that would make the biggest positive impact in their life. That goal should be their main focus. Next, write down the steps necessary to accomplish this exciting goal and encourage them to start taking action on those steps immediately.
2. Kids must learn how to recognize opportunities
Many people never meet their full potential because they fail to recognize opportunity. Teaching your children to seek out opportunities and take action on them, will directly contribute to their level of future success.
How to teach: Praise your children for pointing out small problems or setbacks in their lives that cause them distress such as: soggy sandwiches at lunchtime or not being able to reach items on a high shelf. Brainstorm solutions on how to resolve their troubles. This will teach them to focus on creating positive solutions, instead of focusing on the problem itself. This habit will allow them to create profitable ideas in their future businesses.
3. Selling is involved in every part of life
This one ability will last a lifetime because it is applied to all types of businesses and careers. From selling products and services to customers, to raising capital from investors, this skill is vital to the success of any business.
How to teach: Encourage your children to start with small projects like selling their old toys, starting a lemonade stand, or selling handmade goods. Let them price their products, sell to customers, and facilitate the transactions when sales are made.
4. Financial literacy is a must
This is one area that we all could use help with. Teaching children about money at an early age will instill a financial foundation that schools often fail to teach.
How to teach: Give your children the opportunity to earn their own money through chores, their own small business, and helping you in your business. Teach them about paying themselves first and then giving back. Educate them about investing and how their money could be used to create more money in the future. Help them set up a bank account and learn about how to budget their income.
5. Inspiring creativity will build marketing skills
Teaching kids about marketing is a great way to prepare them to attract customers to their future business. As you know, without customers, even the greatest business will fail. This is a very beneficial skill to learn while young.
How to teach: Motivate your children to start observing marketing materials like billboards, promotional banners in front of businesses, printed advertisements in magazines, and television/radio commercials. Ask them what catches their attention about the message and also quiz them on how to identify things like: the headline, subheadline, and “call to action.” Encourage them to create their own marketing materials for their business ideas.
6. Schools are wrong about FAILURE
In school we were all taught that failure is bad. In the entrepreneurial arena, failure can be a great thing if a positive lesson is learned. Napoleon Hill, author of Think And Grow Rich, states that, “Every failure carries with it a seed of equal or greater benefit.”
Allowing your children to fail will force them to create new ways to accomplish their goals and learn from their mistakes. This will lead to confident children who know how to persevere when times are tough.
How to teach: This lesson is simple. When your children fail, don’t punish, but instead discuss what factors lead to the failure and brainstorm ways to prevent it from happening again in the future. Always seek to find the “learning lesson” in each adversity and encourage your children to NEVER give up.
7. Effective communication improves all relationships
Most children today are terrible at face-to-face and telephone communication because of the popularity of social media and text messaging. Successful businesses require that people actually speak to one another. Teaching your children to communicate effectively will provide them with the winning edge in business and in their personal relationships.
How to teach: First, lead by example. Teach your children to be polite and respectful. Most importantly, practice maintaining eye contact when speaking in person. When using the telephone, teach your children to speak slowly and clearly. A bonus activity would be to practice communicating to your children with e-mails. Do not allow them to abbreviate words and phrases, but instead, write grammatically correct sentences that flow together and convey a complete message.
8. The art of giving back creates happiness
Why start a business if it doesn’t support a greater cause? It is important for your children to develop the characteristic of helping others. This attribute will allow your children to stay humble during periods of great success and it will give them the insight that a successful business provides benefits to more than just it’s owner. People that contribute to the success of others live happy and content lives.
How to teach: When brainstorming business ideas with your children, ask them to choose a charity or special cause to support with a portion of the income that they generate. Explain the concept that all great businesses contribute to improving the lives of other people.
9. Independence creates confidence
Wouldn’t you love to have independent and successful children? Of course! The entrepreneurial mindset causes kids to depend on themselves for their own success, which leads to well-rounded adults and future leaders.
How to teach: The next time your children ask for money to buy their favorite toy, this is your opportunity to ask them to brainstorm ways to create the money through entrepreneurship. This will inspire creative thinking and it will cause the entrepreneurial juices to flow.
10. Get the advantage by becoming a leader now
Children are taught in school to go with the flow and follow the rules. They are programmed to learn and memorize facts instead of becoming independent thinkers. Entrepreneurship forces children to think “outside of the box,” create unique solutions, and lead others. This will make your children leaders at an early age, and it will result in more income, opportunities, and self-confidence, in their lives.
How to teach: Give your children the opportunity to lead their friends in fun activities such as: Outdoor sports, book clubs, music practice, and small business projects. You can also encourage them to propose toasts and small speeches at family dinners and birthday parties to give them experience in public speaking!
http://www.inc.com/ss/duane-squires/10-steps-teaching-your-kids-become-entrepreneurs
1/31/12
Know Thy Enemy, Befriend Rivals
Scrutinize your competitors, and become friends with them, too. You just
might partner to pitch a client, buy one out (or vice versa), or grow
the industry together.
Here's a truth: At BzzAgent, the word-of-mouth marketing firm where I'm CEO, I go to ridiculous extremes to obtain information about our competitors.
I scan Crunchbase, study websites, and download mobile apps. I troll shamelessly for gossip about our rivals' executive teams and star players. And occasionally—when I'm really on my game—I hit pay dirt and obtain a competitor's proposal to a client. And when that happens, our team goes to work. We dissect it for valuable bits of information about our opponents' pricing models, positioning, and capabilities. And it's this information that allows us to accelerate our innovation, understand where our competitors are strong—and determine how we can exploit their weaknesses.
For instance, from one proposal we learned that our flat-fee model was being devalued by another company's "cost-per-engagement" pricing. We created a strategy to counter that objection with clients and prospects. And a few years ago, we got the inside scoop on a new opponent's practice of throwing in-home product-distribution parties for marketers and got ahead of market by developing the next evolution of the concept.
We're also interested in information about our competitors' processes. For a while, one rival company responded to email queries by tersely exclaiming that they only accepted clients who had a minimum of $1 million to spend. Hey, we were happy to accept those that 'just missed' that criteria. In another case, a company that tracks social influence positioned itself as a competitor to us—but inside information proved that their engineering-first culture could be perceived as unfriendly to clients. Our awareness of that issue was the foundation for a very lucrative partnership discussion.
Sun Tsu said it best: "…know thy enemy." As a strategy, this means more than the collection and dissection of as much information on your competitors as possible. Alongside minor cloak-and-dagger data gathering, you should also be developing real, personal relationships with people at all levels of your competitor's businesses. Just as much value—possibly even more—can come from a direct relationship. Why not identify and tackle common challenges and goals? Growing an industry is often about the sum of its parts. With a rival, you might create standards or align to compete against a regulation. Heck, you may even partner to win a big client.
And if you're leading an organization and aren't similarly fixated on both knowledge-gathering strategies, you are putting your company at great risk.
I wasn't always so obsessed. At one time, I thought BzzAgent was untouchable. I believed we could always stay one step ahead of the competition. I was convinced that what we did was often right and what our rivals did was often wrong. Of course we would continue to evolve and they would remain static. But I was wrong.
Many a corporate pundit will tell you to just focus on your own business. Don't get distracted by the competition, they will say. In our case, we were so focused on ourselves that we failed to look up in time to see how things had evolved. We were the first entrant into the space in 2001, and for many years we were considered the only game in town. We didn't have to outpitch anyone. We just had to be us. When competitors finally showed up around 2005, we mocked the fact that they weren't nearly as knowledgeable as we were. We were confident they lacked our experience. We thought their variations on our model wouldn't significantly impact us. But by 2008, we found ourselves losing more projects than we were winning. Competitors had learned how to pitch against us. Their innovations weren't to be mocked; they were to be admired.
I realize now that this happened because competition is different today than it was just a few decades ago. Business in general is moving much faster and ideas can be replicated on the cheap. Competitors—and even companies not yet in your space—will adapt and learn and find ways to become better than you. They are nimble and they will adapt. And while they may falter, it's a much better bet to figure they probably won't. Competitors are often smarter than you think they are, and if you turn a blind eye to them—or even blink for a moment—they're going to eat your lunch. If you care at all about the organization you're leading, gathering significant information about your competitors isn't useful. It's not something that might be worth your time. It's something you must do.
At Smarterer, a Google-backed startup where I'm executive chair, we watched as Gild, a company that had been only tangentially related to us, deployed an almost-exact replica of our solution, which gives people a score based on how adept they are at things like Excel and PHP and Photoshop. While initial reactions included hand-wringing and disappointment at being imitated so closely, we eventually settled on a valuable realization: There is no longer first-mover advantage. This has been replaced by an ability-to-adapt advantage. For those who are willing to gather as much information as possible, react, and innovate ahead of rapid market shifts, success will be inevitable. For those who fail to pay attention to everything happening around them, getting overtaken is the only possible outcome. Yes, it's still true that if you have a good idea, at least 10 other people are doing the same thing—but now they're watching you as closely as you should be watching them.
But you shouldn't consider your competition the evil enemy. They exist for the very same reason you do, and in most cases rising tides do in fact lift all boats. When it came time to sell BzzAgent (we were acquired by Tesco in July 2011), we had a number of direct competitors that became potential suitors, solely because we had shared a beer at one point or worked together on authoring an ethical code for the industry. You might not end up as BFFs, but having a competitor as a "frenemy" can be incredibly valuable.
How do you get there? The route to a competitor relationship begins simply: Pick up the phone and call them. Don't wait; just do it. Or actively seek out your competitors at a conference and introduce yourself. Let them know what you admire about them and offer to share an ingredient in your "secret sauce." Follow up and follow through. Send holiday cards; share client stories. This will break down the barriers that hamper your ability to learn from others and grow your business. The information you gather will be a critical asset that will help you stay ahead in your industry.
And if a frenemy asks, don't lie. You can say, "Yes, we do have copies of your proposals. Know what? I'll send you one of mine. After all, maybe we can learn something from one another."
http://www.inc.com/dave-balter/start-up-strategy-know-thy-enemy-befriend-rivals.html
Here's a truth: At BzzAgent, the word-of-mouth marketing firm where I'm CEO, I go to ridiculous extremes to obtain information about our competitors.
I scan Crunchbase, study websites, and download mobile apps. I troll shamelessly for gossip about our rivals' executive teams and star players. And occasionally—when I'm really on my game—I hit pay dirt and obtain a competitor's proposal to a client. And when that happens, our team goes to work. We dissect it for valuable bits of information about our opponents' pricing models, positioning, and capabilities. And it's this information that allows us to accelerate our innovation, understand where our competitors are strong—and determine how we can exploit their weaknesses.
For instance, from one proposal we learned that our flat-fee model was being devalued by another company's "cost-per-engagement" pricing. We created a strategy to counter that objection with clients and prospects. And a few years ago, we got the inside scoop on a new opponent's practice of throwing in-home product-distribution parties for marketers and got ahead of market by developing the next evolution of the concept.
We're also interested in information about our competitors' processes. For a while, one rival company responded to email queries by tersely exclaiming that they only accepted clients who had a minimum of $1 million to spend. Hey, we were happy to accept those that 'just missed' that criteria. In another case, a company that tracks social influence positioned itself as a competitor to us—but inside information proved that their engineering-first culture could be perceived as unfriendly to clients. Our awareness of that issue was the foundation for a very lucrative partnership discussion.
Sun Tsu said it best: "…know thy enemy." As a strategy, this means more than the collection and dissection of as much information on your competitors as possible. Alongside minor cloak-and-dagger data gathering, you should also be developing real, personal relationships with people at all levels of your competitor's businesses. Just as much value—possibly even more—can come from a direct relationship. Why not identify and tackle common challenges and goals? Growing an industry is often about the sum of its parts. With a rival, you might create standards or align to compete against a regulation. Heck, you may even partner to win a big client.
And if you're leading an organization and aren't similarly fixated on both knowledge-gathering strategies, you are putting your company at great risk.
I wasn't always so obsessed. At one time, I thought BzzAgent was untouchable. I believed we could always stay one step ahead of the competition. I was convinced that what we did was often right and what our rivals did was often wrong. Of course we would continue to evolve and they would remain static. But I was wrong.
Many a corporate pundit will tell you to just focus on your own business. Don't get distracted by the competition, they will say. In our case, we were so focused on ourselves that we failed to look up in time to see how things had evolved. We were the first entrant into the space in 2001, and for many years we were considered the only game in town. We didn't have to outpitch anyone. We just had to be us. When competitors finally showed up around 2005, we mocked the fact that they weren't nearly as knowledgeable as we were. We were confident they lacked our experience. We thought their variations on our model wouldn't significantly impact us. But by 2008, we found ourselves losing more projects than we were winning. Competitors had learned how to pitch against us. Their innovations weren't to be mocked; they were to be admired.
I realize now that this happened because competition is different today than it was just a few decades ago. Business in general is moving much faster and ideas can be replicated on the cheap. Competitors—and even companies not yet in your space—will adapt and learn and find ways to become better than you. They are nimble and they will adapt. And while they may falter, it's a much better bet to figure they probably won't. Competitors are often smarter than you think they are, and if you turn a blind eye to them—or even blink for a moment—they're going to eat your lunch. If you care at all about the organization you're leading, gathering significant information about your competitors isn't useful. It's not something that might be worth your time. It's something you must do.
At Smarterer, a Google-backed startup where I'm executive chair, we watched as Gild, a company that had been only tangentially related to us, deployed an almost-exact replica of our solution, which gives people a score based on how adept they are at things like Excel and PHP and Photoshop. While initial reactions included hand-wringing and disappointment at being imitated so closely, we eventually settled on a valuable realization: There is no longer first-mover advantage. This has been replaced by an ability-to-adapt advantage. For those who are willing to gather as much information as possible, react, and innovate ahead of rapid market shifts, success will be inevitable. For those who fail to pay attention to everything happening around them, getting overtaken is the only possible outcome. Yes, it's still true that if you have a good idea, at least 10 other people are doing the same thing—but now they're watching you as closely as you should be watching them.
But you shouldn't consider your competition the evil enemy. They exist for the very same reason you do, and in most cases rising tides do in fact lift all boats. When it came time to sell BzzAgent (we were acquired by Tesco in July 2011), we had a number of direct competitors that became potential suitors, solely because we had shared a beer at one point or worked together on authoring an ethical code for the industry. You might not end up as BFFs, but having a competitor as a "frenemy" can be incredibly valuable.
How do you get there? The route to a competitor relationship begins simply: Pick up the phone and call them. Don't wait; just do it. Or actively seek out your competitors at a conference and introduce yourself. Let them know what you admire about them and offer to share an ingredient in your "secret sauce." Follow up and follow through. Send holiday cards; share client stories. This will break down the barriers that hamper your ability to learn from others and grow your business. The information you gather will be a critical asset that will help you stay ahead in your industry.
And if a frenemy asks, don't lie. You can say, "Yes, we do have copies of your proposals. Know what? I'll send you one of mine. After all, maybe we can learn something from one another."
http://www.inc.com/dave-balter/start-up-strategy-know-thy-enemy-befriend-rivals.html
I Broke These 6 Business Rules. Why You Should, Too.
I may be a rule-follower by nature. But when it comes to my own company, I've learned when to color outside the lines.
I am not a risk taker. Even as a child, I always did what teachers told me to do and listened to my parents -- well, most of the time. Through college and the early part of my career at technology companies, I followed a linear and predictable path to get to the next level of management, the next promotion, the next raise.
But then I started my own business. That’s when everything changed. No risk meant no reward. I learned that sometimes, the standard rules don’t apply. Especially these:
1. Never Work With Friends and Family.
The first two people I hired were my sister and my best friend’s sister. Why? My sister Lori is the most detail-oriented person I know, and Michelle was Nordstrom-trained on customer service. It’s been 15 years, and they are still with my company, kicking butt and keeping me sane. Sure, we’ve had a few disagreements, but Lori and Michelle have always been extremely committed to our success and respectful of my role as leader. We trust each other and discuss parenting tips as easily as project updates.
2. Get an MBA.
As we’ve learned from Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and Mark Zuckerberg, having an advanced business degree is not required for successful entrepreneurship. Leverage smart people, trust your instincts and just get out there. I gained tremendous insight by joining an angel investment group to see how other entrepreneurs positioned and marketed their companies. Professional organizations in my industry led me to successful owners whom I still tap for advice. And a CEO organization called Vistage gives me access to a braintrust of experts on any business matter.
3. Sales is the Key to Success.
As the business owner, I was the primary rainmaker for years. Unfortunately, I sucked at sales. I hate asking for money. So I hired professional salespeople, and they all failed miserably. Now I understand that my customers hate being sold as much as I hate selling. They really just want someone who will share a cup of coffee and understand their pain, then come up with a solution that doesn’t require even more work. That’s all.
4. You’ve Gotta Get a Plan.
For years, our team didn’t have any formal business plan, just a revenue target and a few key objectives. Of course, like a map-less Magellan, you can waste time and resources. You can even fail to notice when you do reach your goal. But spending weeks discussing and writing a comprehensive plan that few will follow isn’t productive either. Our started simple, and it’s staying that way: One page with an annual revenue target and theme agreed upon by the entire team, followed by one or two major initiatives for each person per quarter. That’s it. When the tech market dipped in 2009, our “plan” allowed us to quickly shift gears. We eased up on major account sales and made a major investment in social media. In the end, that’s what moved our recovery along.
5. Diversify Your Client Base.
Really, we’ve tried for years. But when an industry giant is your largest client and managers tell colleagues in other departments about you, who’s to complain? Word-of-mouth marketing is always a gift. Sure, we’ve worked with many other large clients, and plenty of small clients too, but our largest client is the one that keeps us in business. We work hard to earn their business again every day.
6. Never Work for Free.
There are still rare occasions when we give away our services. Actually, it’s how we started this business--by connecting friends who needed marketing and PR help with friends who provided exactly that expertise. After two years we knew there was a true business opportunity. And while we do have rent, payroll, insurance, taxes and other overhead costs now, there are times when we can’t resist supporting a non-profit organization or an especially close friend.
I may still be a rule-follower at heart. I still use my turn signals and wait patiently in lines. But one of the most exciting things about being an entrepreneur is being creative and discovering what works best, even if it goes against what others recommend. That’s the beauty of being your own boss.
http://www.inc.com/rene-siegel/i-broke-these-six-business-rules-why-you-should-too.html
I am not a risk taker. Even as a child, I always did what teachers told me to do and listened to my parents -- well, most of the time. Through college and the early part of my career at technology companies, I followed a linear and predictable path to get to the next level of management, the next promotion, the next raise.
But then I started my own business. That’s when everything changed. No risk meant no reward. I learned that sometimes, the standard rules don’t apply. Especially these:
1. Never Work With Friends and Family.
The first two people I hired were my sister and my best friend’s sister. Why? My sister Lori is the most detail-oriented person I know, and Michelle was Nordstrom-trained on customer service. It’s been 15 years, and they are still with my company, kicking butt and keeping me sane. Sure, we’ve had a few disagreements, but Lori and Michelle have always been extremely committed to our success and respectful of my role as leader. We trust each other and discuss parenting tips as easily as project updates.
2. Get an MBA.
As we’ve learned from Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and Mark Zuckerberg, having an advanced business degree is not required for successful entrepreneurship. Leverage smart people, trust your instincts and just get out there. I gained tremendous insight by joining an angel investment group to see how other entrepreneurs positioned and marketed their companies. Professional organizations in my industry led me to successful owners whom I still tap for advice. And a CEO organization called Vistage gives me access to a braintrust of experts on any business matter.
3. Sales is the Key to Success.
As the business owner, I was the primary rainmaker for years. Unfortunately, I sucked at sales. I hate asking for money. So I hired professional salespeople, and they all failed miserably. Now I understand that my customers hate being sold as much as I hate selling. They really just want someone who will share a cup of coffee and understand their pain, then come up with a solution that doesn’t require even more work. That’s all.
4. You’ve Gotta Get a Plan.
For years, our team didn’t have any formal business plan, just a revenue target and a few key objectives. Of course, like a map-less Magellan, you can waste time and resources. You can even fail to notice when you do reach your goal. But spending weeks discussing and writing a comprehensive plan that few will follow isn’t productive either. Our started simple, and it’s staying that way: One page with an annual revenue target and theme agreed upon by the entire team, followed by one or two major initiatives for each person per quarter. That’s it. When the tech market dipped in 2009, our “plan” allowed us to quickly shift gears. We eased up on major account sales and made a major investment in social media. In the end, that’s what moved our recovery along.
5. Diversify Your Client Base.
Really, we’ve tried for years. But when an industry giant is your largest client and managers tell colleagues in other departments about you, who’s to complain? Word-of-mouth marketing is always a gift. Sure, we’ve worked with many other large clients, and plenty of small clients too, but our largest client is the one that keeps us in business. We work hard to earn their business again every day.
6. Never Work for Free.
There are still rare occasions when we give away our services. Actually, it’s how we started this business--by connecting friends who needed marketing and PR help with friends who provided exactly that expertise. After two years we knew there was a true business opportunity. And while we do have rent, payroll, insurance, taxes and other overhead costs now, there are times when we can’t resist supporting a non-profit organization or an especially close friend.
I may still be a rule-follower at heart. I still use my turn signals and wait patiently in lines. But one of the most exciting things about being an entrepreneur is being creative and discovering what works best, even if it goes against what others recommend. That’s the beauty of being your own boss.
http://www.inc.com/rene-siegel/i-broke-these-six-business-rules-why-you-should-too.html
8 Ways to Build Customer Loyalty
Top salespeople use these simple rules to keep their customers buying from them--even in the face of steep competition.
Customer loyalty is the key to profitability. The reason is simple. It costs more–geometrically more–to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one.
Without customer loyalty, customers leave. Then you can end up sacrificing as much as a third of your sales year just to get your numbers back to where they were the previous year. Ouch.
With that in mind, did you ever wonder how top salespeople keep their customers so loyal? It's not because they have great products or they're good at schmoozing. The secret to customer loyalty lies in putting the interests of the customer ahead of your own. It's really that simple.
Here are eight rules for making this happen:
1. Have a sales philosophy that emphasizes relationship building.
2. Define a unique niche and become the customer's expert on it.
3. Help the customer build the customer's own business.
4. Translate what you offer into the customer's business results.
5. Value the relationship more than making your quota.
6. Think end-of-time friendships, not end-of-month totals.
7. Achieve a perfect job of delivering what you've promised.
8. Provide absolutely impeccable service after the sale.
The above is based on a conversation I had with amazing sales mega-guru Jeff Gitomer. I love his stuff and I featured some of his ideas in my recently published book.
http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/8-ways-to-build-customer-loyalty.html
Customer loyalty is the key to profitability. The reason is simple. It costs more–geometrically more–to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one.
Without customer loyalty, customers leave. Then you can end up sacrificing as much as a third of your sales year just to get your numbers back to where they were the previous year. Ouch.
With that in mind, did you ever wonder how top salespeople keep their customers so loyal? It's not because they have great products or they're good at schmoozing. The secret to customer loyalty lies in putting the interests of the customer ahead of your own. It's really that simple.
Here are eight rules for making this happen:
1. Have a sales philosophy that emphasizes relationship building.
2. Define a unique niche and become the customer's expert on it.
3. Help the customer build the customer's own business.
4. Translate what you offer into the customer's business results.
5. Value the relationship more than making your quota.
6. Think end-of-time friendships, not end-of-month totals.
7. Achieve a perfect job of delivering what you've promised.
8. Provide absolutely impeccable service after the sale.
The above is based on a conversation I had with amazing sales mega-guru Jeff Gitomer. I love his stuff and I featured some of his ideas in my recently published book.
http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/8-ways-to-build-customer-loyalty.html
1/30/12
Who Are Your A-list Customers?
Which customers should you be rolling out the red carpet for? Follow
these three steps to identify the customers and prospects worth
nurturing.
Attention this time of year turns to the Golden Globes, Oscars, and A-list celebrities. It got us thinking about our own A-list customers–the companies we would love to have as large and active clients.
Each business has, or should have, an A list of its most valuable customers and prospects, but also a B, C, and D list. But too often, companies, especially growing companies, lack focus and cast a wide net to attract new customers. They end up spending valuable time and resources on C- and D-list prospects and miss opportunities to cement long-term relationships with their A-list customers, who not only bring valuable business but also provide important endorsements to their friends and business colleagues.
It’s worth spending time as a management team to develop your own A list. We recently did just that, using a simple, three-step process that has given our team renewed focus on the customers that will drive our business in the long term.
1. Define the key drivers of long-term customer value.
What makes a customer more or less valuable to your business? Is it their size, their ability to spend, or their past behavior or relationship with your company? Are there specific demographics that link to customer value? In our business, where we work with management teams to make growth companies more valuable, we created a “mindset” criterion as one of the characteristics that make a customer valuable. Define the three to five drivers of value for your business.
2. Create a comprehensive list of customers and prospects.
While most companies try to maintain a robust customer pipeline, we find that many don’t proactively develop a “long list.” Instead, they create a partial list that is mostly reactive to customer or prospect inquiries. If you are broader in developing your long list, you’ll be better positioned to identify the most valuable customers and prospects in your market.
3. Develop a customer value scorecard.
Rank every customer on the long list across each of the value drivers you identified in Step 1. Keep it simple: a 0-3 scale will work for most businesses. For our “mindset” ranking, we gave management teams that were open to innovative, strategic and fact-based thinking a three (most attractive), while those that made snap, erratic judgments were given a zero. Take the average of the scores across your criteria to develop a “value score” for each customer.
The goal is to develop four to five branches of customers: A-list (highest average score), B-list, and so on. Precise scores are not as important as knowing which customers are more or less valuable than others. Shoot for an equal number of customers in each bucket, although you may find there are natural “breaks” of customers that are clearly above or below the adjoining groups.
By investing the majority of time and resources to your newly defined A-list clients and prospects, you’re likely to have more success developing valuable, long-term relationships–relationships that should pay off for years to come.
http://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/who-are-your-a-list-customers.html
Attention this time of year turns to the Golden Globes, Oscars, and A-list celebrities. It got us thinking about our own A-list customers–the companies we would love to have as large and active clients.
Each business has, or should have, an A list of its most valuable customers and prospects, but also a B, C, and D list. But too often, companies, especially growing companies, lack focus and cast a wide net to attract new customers. They end up spending valuable time and resources on C- and D-list prospects and miss opportunities to cement long-term relationships with their A-list customers, who not only bring valuable business but also provide important endorsements to their friends and business colleagues.
It’s worth spending time as a management team to develop your own A list. We recently did just that, using a simple, three-step process that has given our team renewed focus on the customers that will drive our business in the long term.
1. Define the key drivers of long-term customer value.
What makes a customer more or less valuable to your business? Is it their size, their ability to spend, or their past behavior or relationship with your company? Are there specific demographics that link to customer value? In our business, where we work with management teams to make growth companies more valuable, we created a “mindset” criterion as one of the characteristics that make a customer valuable. Define the three to five drivers of value for your business.
2. Create a comprehensive list of customers and prospects.
While most companies try to maintain a robust customer pipeline, we find that many don’t proactively develop a “long list.” Instead, they create a partial list that is mostly reactive to customer or prospect inquiries. If you are broader in developing your long list, you’ll be better positioned to identify the most valuable customers and prospects in your market.
3. Develop a customer value scorecard.
Rank every customer on the long list across each of the value drivers you identified in Step 1. Keep it simple: a 0-3 scale will work for most businesses. For our “mindset” ranking, we gave management teams that were open to innovative, strategic and fact-based thinking a three (most attractive), while those that made snap, erratic judgments were given a zero. Take the average of the scores across your criteria to develop a “value score” for each customer.
The goal is to develop four to five branches of customers: A-list (highest average score), B-list, and so on. Precise scores are not as important as knowing which customers are more or less valuable than others. Shoot for an equal number of customers in each bucket, although you may find there are natural “breaks” of customers that are clearly above or below the adjoining groups.
By investing the majority of time and resources to your newly defined A-list clients and prospects, you’re likely to have more success developing valuable, long-term relationships–relationships that should pay off for years to come.
http://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/who-are-your-a-list-customers.html
1/21/12
You Can Win Customers for Life
Looking to build strong relationships with your clients? Master their personal styles.
At AnswerLab, one of my main missions is to provide amazing service to our customers. Zappos has pioneered the revolution of customer-focused businesses with its message to spread happiness. Countless business books advise us to learn what the customers want and simply give it to them. What they don't talk about is the importance of understanding the customer's personal style and communication preferences in order to do that. Without that, how do you earn the customer's trust?
Why care about customer style?
Our personal styles govern a great deal about how we react in situations, communicate with one another, and make decisions. Each of us perceives the world around us differently. Our willingness to fulfill a request may increase or decrease simply due to the way in which a request is delivered. Provide too much information, and a client may not respond at all. Provide too little information, and a client may lose trust. How do you know how much information to share? Start by understanding your customers' styles and how to tailor your interactions with them. To do so, you need a simple framework for knowing the minds of your customers.
Find a behavioral model
At AnswerLab, we use the "DiSC" behavioral model to understand personal styles. Many models have been developed (HBDI, Meyers-Briggs, 16PF, among others), but we've found DiSC to be the easiest to adopt, communicate, and observe in others. Every employee on our team receives a DiSC assessment within a month of joining the company. DiSC tells us what motivates us, what scares us, and how we behave in various situations. It also tells us a great deal about how we absorb and process information. Using this model allows us to:
1) Better anticipate customer needs
2) Develop deeper empathy for the customer perspective
3) Make the customer's personal style differences objective rather than subjective
4) Discuss differing perspectives with customers rationally instead of emotionally
The DiSC has four quadrants: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. Each of us exhibits some combination of these behaviors. Once you learn the model and specifics of the quadrants, you can easily figure out how someone might fit in it, without ever seeing a formal professional assessment. That means you can quickly assess the style of customers and learn how to better communicate with them.
Apply the behavioral model
Once you know the model and how to identify behavioral traits in customers, you can develop a few simple communication norms. Some examples:
Let's get it done! This attitude is indicative of the "dominance" profile. If your customer is high in the dominance quadrant, she'll be extremely motivated to get things done. With these clients, you should be direct, offer alternatives, ensure she "wins," act quickly, and focus on issues. A slow response to this client will particularly frustrate her.
Let's get it right! This is the mindset of a customer who is high in the compliance quadrant. He is motivated to work within established rules, guidelines, and procedures to ensure accuracy and quality. When communicating with a "High C," be sure to listen carefully, be thorough, answer questions correctly, and use written supporting materials. Send one wrong piece of information and the customer will begin to lose trust in everything you do.
Let's be positive! This sounds like an "influence" profile. A customer who ranks high in the Influence quadrant often tries to persuade, promote, or influence others in a positive way. This kind of person is very focused on keeping others happy. When managing this type of customer, be sure to maintain a positive atmosphere, allow her to express herself, take time to chat and talk, focus on the big picture, and be enthusiastic. If you use a confrontational tone, she may retreat.
Let's do it as agreed! This is the "steadiness" profile. These customers tend to be cooperative, supportive, agreeable, and highly motivated to keep the status quo. When working with this someone like this, proceed in a logical order, ask specific questions to find out true needs, provide support, and remember fairness and justice. For this customer, changing process rapidly will make them feel uneasy.
Each style in the DiSC model has a preferred mode of interaction. Learn them, adopt them in your communication, and you'll earn customer trust and loyalty for life.
http://www.inc.com/amy-buckner-chowdhry/how-to-win-customers-for-life-master-personal-style.html
At AnswerLab, one of my main missions is to provide amazing service to our customers. Zappos has pioneered the revolution of customer-focused businesses with its message to spread happiness. Countless business books advise us to learn what the customers want and simply give it to them. What they don't talk about is the importance of understanding the customer's personal style and communication preferences in order to do that. Without that, how do you earn the customer's trust?
Why care about customer style?
Our personal styles govern a great deal about how we react in situations, communicate with one another, and make decisions. Each of us perceives the world around us differently. Our willingness to fulfill a request may increase or decrease simply due to the way in which a request is delivered. Provide too much information, and a client may not respond at all. Provide too little information, and a client may lose trust. How do you know how much information to share? Start by understanding your customers' styles and how to tailor your interactions with them. To do so, you need a simple framework for knowing the minds of your customers.
Find a behavioral model
At AnswerLab, we use the "DiSC" behavioral model to understand personal styles. Many models have been developed (HBDI, Meyers-Briggs, 16PF, among others), but we've found DiSC to be the easiest to adopt, communicate, and observe in others. Every employee on our team receives a DiSC assessment within a month of joining the company. DiSC tells us what motivates us, what scares us, and how we behave in various situations. It also tells us a great deal about how we absorb and process information. Using this model allows us to:
1) Better anticipate customer needs
2) Develop deeper empathy for the customer perspective
3) Make the customer's personal style differences objective rather than subjective
4) Discuss differing perspectives with customers rationally instead of emotionally
The DiSC has four quadrants: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance. Each of us exhibits some combination of these behaviors. Once you learn the model and specifics of the quadrants, you can easily figure out how someone might fit in it, without ever seeing a formal professional assessment. That means you can quickly assess the style of customers and learn how to better communicate with them.
Apply the behavioral model
Once you know the model and how to identify behavioral traits in customers, you can develop a few simple communication norms. Some examples:
Let's get it done! This attitude is indicative of the "dominance" profile. If your customer is high in the dominance quadrant, she'll be extremely motivated to get things done. With these clients, you should be direct, offer alternatives, ensure she "wins," act quickly, and focus on issues. A slow response to this client will particularly frustrate her.
Let's get it right! This is the mindset of a customer who is high in the compliance quadrant. He is motivated to work within established rules, guidelines, and procedures to ensure accuracy and quality. When communicating with a "High C," be sure to listen carefully, be thorough, answer questions correctly, and use written supporting materials. Send one wrong piece of information and the customer will begin to lose trust in everything you do.
Let's be positive! This sounds like an "influence" profile. A customer who ranks high in the Influence quadrant often tries to persuade, promote, or influence others in a positive way. This kind of person is very focused on keeping others happy. When managing this type of customer, be sure to maintain a positive atmosphere, allow her to express herself, take time to chat and talk, focus on the big picture, and be enthusiastic. If you use a confrontational tone, she may retreat.
Let's do it as agreed! This is the "steadiness" profile. These customers tend to be cooperative, supportive, agreeable, and highly motivated to keep the status quo. When working with this someone like this, proceed in a logical order, ask specific questions to find out true needs, provide support, and remember fairness and justice. For this customer, changing process rapidly will make them feel uneasy.
Each style in the DiSC model has a preferred mode of interaction. Learn them, adopt them in your communication, and you'll earn customer trust and loyalty for life.
http://www.inc.com/amy-buckner-chowdhry/how-to-win-customers-for-life-master-personal-style.html
How to Excel at Anything
Hit a performance wall? Here are four ways to break through it.
You’re good.
You could be better.
Consider a skill you've developed: Business, sports, personal, anything. At first you were terrible.
Terrible is a great place to start because improving on terrible is easy. With a little practice you turned terrible into mediocre.
And you had fun, because improvement is fun.
Then with a lot more practice—practice that started to be a little less fun—you got even better.
Now you’re good. Maybe you’re even really good.
But you’re not great. And somewhere along the way you stopped improving, stopped having fun, and started to think you weren’t capable of being great.
Why did you stop improving and stop having fun? Hitting the wall wasn't due to a lack of effort, or willpower, or even talent. You stopped improving because of the way you applied your effort and willpower.
Say you’ve developed reasonable proficiency at a physical skill. Take golf. At first every swing of the club felt awkward, but you gradually found a groove. You started to think less. You quit thinking about your hips. You quit thinking about the height of your back swing. You quit thinking about what your wrists do in your follow-through.
You started thinking less because your skills became more automatic. In some ways that's a great sign: Automatic means you internalized a skill.
But automatic is also a bad sign. Anything you do automatically, without thinking, is really hard to adjust. To get better you must find ways to force yourself to adapt and modify what you already do well.
Here are four ways to force yourself to adapt—and in the process rediscover the joy of improving:
Go fast. Force yourself to perform a task more quickly. You’ll make mistakes; probably lots of them. Don't get frustrated. The more mistakes you make the better, because the best way to learn is from making mistakes. If a product demo usually takes 10 minutes, fly through it in five. (As a practice run, of course.) You’ll break free from some old habits, adapt to the faster speed, and find ways to make a good presentation even better.
Go slow. Take your time. Take too much time. Swinging a golf club in slow motion allows you to feel muscles working that you normally don’t notice. Taking more time to run through your sales pitch will uncover opportunities to highlight additional customer benefits. Going slower is a great way to notice habits that have become automatic—and to examine each one of them critically.
Go piece by piece. Every complex task is made up of a series of steps. Pick a step and focus solely on that step. Break a sales call into component pieces; first focus on perfecting your opening. No customer is the same, so develop modifications you can instantly apply to different scenarios. Deconstruct each step, master that step, and move on to the next one. When you put all the pieces back together your skills will be markedly improved.
March to a different drum. We all settle on ways to measure our performance; typically we choose a method that lets us feel good about our performance. So pick a different measurement. If you normally measure accuracy, measure speed instead. If you normally measure leads generated, measure conversions instead. Use video. Ask a colleague to critique your performance. Your customers, your vendors, and your employees all measure your performance differently than you do. View yourself from their perspective and you’ll easily find areas for improvement.
Think this process won’t help you excel? Consider this passage from Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open:
When you try to do your best every time, every mistake you make is obvious, even if only to you. Learn from every mistake. Adapt and modify your techniques so you constantly improve.
Because when you keep improving you keep having fun—and all the focused effort you put in will once again feel worth it.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-excel-at-anything.html
You’re good.
You could be better.
Consider a skill you've developed: Business, sports, personal, anything. At first you were terrible.
Terrible is a great place to start because improving on terrible is easy. With a little practice you turned terrible into mediocre.
And you had fun, because improvement is fun.
Then with a lot more practice—practice that started to be a little less fun—you got even better.
Now you’re good. Maybe you’re even really good.
But you’re not great. And somewhere along the way you stopped improving, stopped having fun, and started to think you weren’t capable of being great.
Why did you stop improving and stop having fun? Hitting the wall wasn't due to a lack of effort, or willpower, or even talent. You stopped improving because of the way you applied your effort and willpower.
Say you’ve developed reasonable proficiency at a physical skill. Take golf. At first every swing of the club felt awkward, but you gradually found a groove. You started to think less. You quit thinking about your hips. You quit thinking about the height of your back swing. You quit thinking about what your wrists do in your follow-through.
You started thinking less because your skills became more automatic. In some ways that's a great sign: Automatic means you internalized a skill.
But automatic is also a bad sign. Anything you do automatically, without thinking, is really hard to adjust. To get better you must find ways to force yourself to adapt and modify what you already do well.
Here are four ways to force yourself to adapt—and in the process rediscover the joy of improving:
Go fast. Force yourself to perform a task more quickly. You’ll make mistakes; probably lots of them. Don't get frustrated. The more mistakes you make the better, because the best way to learn is from making mistakes. If a product demo usually takes 10 minutes, fly through it in five. (As a practice run, of course.) You’ll break free from some old habits, adapt to the faster speed, and find ways to make a good presentation even better.
Go slow. Take your time. Take too much time. Swinging a golf club in slow motion allows you to feel muscles working that you normally don’t notice. Taking more time to run through your sales pitch will uncover opportunities to highlight additional customer benefits. Going slower is a great way to notice habits that have become automatic—and to examine each one of them critically.
Go piece by piece. Every complex task is made up of a series of steps. Pick a step and focus solely on that step. Break a sales call into component pieces; first focus on perfecting your opening. No customer is the same, so develop modifications you can instantly apply to different scenarios. Deconstruct each step, master that step, and move on to the next one. When you put all the pieces back together your skills will be markedly improved.
March to a different drum. We all settle on ways to measure our performance; typically we choose a method that lets us feel good about our performance. So pick a different measurement. If you normally measure accuracy, measure speed instead. If you normally measure leads generated, measure conversions instead. Use video. Ask a colleague to critique your performance. Your customers, your vendors, and your employees all measure your performance differently than you do. View yourself from their perspective and you’ll easily find areas for improvement.
Think this process won’t help you excel? Consider this passage from Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open:
Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball…
Every third ball… hits a ball already on the ground, causing a crazy sideways hop. I adjust at the last second, catch the ball early, and hit it smartly across the net. I know this is no ordinary reflex. I know there are few children in the world who could have seen that ball, let alone hit it…
My father says that if I hit 2,500 balls each day, I’ll hit 17,500 balls each week, and at the end of one year I’ll have hit nearly one million balls. He believes in math. Numbers, he says, don’t lie. A child who hits one million balls each year will be unbeatable.
When you try to do your best every time, every mistake you make is obvious, even if only to you. Learn from every mistake. Adapt and modify your techniques so you constantly improve.
Because when you keep improving you keep having fun—and all the focused effort you put in will once again feel worth it.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-to-excel-at-anything.html
1/18/12
7 Must-Have Qualities to Look for in Employees
The smaller your business, the more crucial it is to get every new hire right. If you find someone with these 7 traits, make an offer -- quick.
While every hiring decision is important, the smaller your business the more important it is you hire the right people. When employee No. 300 turns out to be a disaster, the impact on the business is relatively small and often confined to a small group of staff.
When employee No. 3 turns out to be a disaster, everyone—and everything—suffers.
That's why attitude is everything. You can teach skills, but it's nearly impossible to teach and instill enthusiasm, teamwork and independence (great employees have both), and motivation.
And that’s why great small business employees:
Can come across a little different. People who are quirky, sometimes irreverent, and happy to be different may seem a little out there, but in a really good way. An employee who isn’t afraid to stand out or stretch boundaries often comes up with the best ideas—and helps you think in different ways, too.
May lack polish but overflow with personality. Think about your favorite customers, vendors, or suppliers. What typically comes to mind first? Those people are personable, friendly, outgoing, and make your day a little more fun. Look for the same qualities in the people you hire. Customers buy more and build longer-term relationships from people they like.
Think, “I’ll do whatever you need. It’s all 8 hours to me." I first heard that expression when I asked an employee to help me clean up after a backed-up sewer line spread (incredibly unpleasant) fluid across the warehouse floor. He smiled and said, "Sure. It's all 8 hours to me."
He felt he was paid to work for 8 hours, so the tasks he performed during that time period didn't matter (in a good way). Great employees are willing to do whatever it takes. Great employees are more concerned with overall objectives and goals than their individual duties.
Possess one outstanding skill. Small businesses have a variety of specific needs: Running the website, processing orders, generating leads, etc. Many roles can be outsourced. If you have the choice, only bring roles in-house because the candidate is truly outstanding.
Aren’t concerned with job descriptions or organizational structures. To a business owner a prospective employee who asks to see a detailed job description is waving a giant red flag. Employees are paid to work, not hold a position. (If you don't feel there's a difference you haven't run a small business.)
Want to learn and take over. You're often overwhelmed, so having the luxury to delegate and forget is extremely valuable. While employees with an independent streak can be more difficult to manage the payoff is definitely worth it.
Asked you for a job. Say you sell products online. One day a college senior walks in and says, "I checked out your website. I don’t mean to be rude, but it could be a lot better. I graduate soon and would love to work for you. Here’s a list of the changes I would make in the first three months, and here’s a breakdown of how those changes will improve SEO results and conversion rates. She’s targeted her approach, she’s done her homework, and she’s displayed a level of initiative every business owner hopes to find. While a prospective employee will rarely knock on your door, when one does, give her serious consideration.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/7-must-have-qualities-to-look-for-in-employees.html
While every hiring decision is important, the smaller your business the more important it is you hire the right people. When employee No. 300 turns out to be a disaster, the impact on the business is relatively small and often confined to a small group of staff.
When employee No. 3 turns out to be a disaster, everyone—and everything—suffers.
That's why attitude is everything. You can teach skills, but it's nearly impossible to teach and instill enthusiasm, teamwork and independence (great employees have both), and motivation.
And that’s why great small business employees:
Can come across a little different. People who are quirky, sometimes irreverent, and happy to be different may seem a little out there, but in a really good way. An employee who isn’t afraid to stand out or stretch boundaries often comes up with the best ideas—and helps you think in different ways, too.
May lack polish but overflow with personality. Think about your favorite customers, vendors, or suppliers. What typically comes to mind first? Those people are personable, friendly, outgoing, and make your day a little more fun. Look for the same qualities in the people you hire. Customers buy more and build longer-term relationships from people they like.
Think, “I’ll do whatever you need. It’s all 8 hours to me." I first heard that expression when I asked an employee to help me clean up after a backed-up sewer line spread (incredibly unpleasant) fluid across the warehouse floor. He smiled and said, "Sure. It's all 8 hours to me."
He felt he was paid to work for 8 hours, so the tasks he performed during that time period didn't matter (in a good way). Great employees are willing to do whatever it takes. Great employees are more concerned with overall objectives and goals than their individual duties.
Possess one outstanding skill. Small businesses have a variety of specific needs: Running the website, processing orders, generating leads, etc. Many roles can be outsourced. If you have the choice, only bring roles in-house because the candidate is truly outstanding.
Aren’t concerned with job descriptions or organizational structures. To a business owner a prospective employee who asks to see a detailed job description is waving a giant red flag. Employees are paid to work, not hold a position. (If you don't feel there's a difference you haven't run a small business.)
Want to learn and take over. You're often overwhelmed, so having the luxury to delegate and forget is extremely valuable. While employees with an independent streak can be more difficult to manage the payoff is definitely worth it.
Asked you for a job. Say you sell products online. One day a college senior walks in and says, "I checked out your website. I don’t mean to be rude, but it could be a lot better. I graduate soon and would love to work for you. Here’s a list of the changes I would make in the first three months, and here’s a breakdown of how those changes will improve SEO results and conversion rates. She’s targeted her approach, she’s done her homework, and she’s displayed a level of initiative every business owner hopes to find. While a prospective employee will rarely knock on your door, when one does, give her serious consideration.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/7-must-have-qualities-to-look-for-in-employees.html
1/13/12
The One Decision Every Great Entrepreneur Makes
Good founders benefit from vision and courage. But great founders know their success hinges on this one crucial decision.
Business is a lot like sports. While business is rarely a zero-sum game, since success does not have to come at the expense of others, still, some companies win while others lose—and the reasons why aren't always obvious.
Take basketball. As Bill Simmons (the most insightful and entertaining sportswriter on the planet) writes in his outstanding The Book of Basketball:
Simmons calls this principle "The Secret" and says (quoting NBA-great Isiah Thomas), “The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball.”
The same principle applies to business. Talent is obviously important, but the ability to work together, check egos at the door, and make individual sacrifices when necessary is the only way a team succeeds.
Think about the business teams you’ve seen fail. Rarely was their failure due to a lack of talent or even the absence of a great idea. More often they failed because of personality conflicts, ego clashes, or competing agendas.
So is the secret of business that it’s not about business?
Not quite. Later in the book Simmons describes The Secret to Hall-of-Famer Bill Walton.
That's why every great leader makes the same decision. Walton believes success at the highest level in basketball comes down to one question: "Can you make the choice that your happiness can come from someone else’s success?"
If you can make that decision you take the most important step towards becoming a great leader.
No entrepreneur has qualities like courage, vision, charisma, adaptability, and decisiveness in equal measure.
But every great entrepreneur does make the same decision—and so can you.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-one-decision-every-great-entrepreneur-makes.html
Business is a lot like sports. While business is rarely a zero-sum game, since success does not have to come at the expense of others, still, some companies win while others lose—and the reasons why aren't always obvious.
Take basketball. As Bill Simmons (the most insightful and entertaining sportswriter on the planet) writes in his outstanding The Book of Basketball:
[The Lakers and Celtics] were loaded with talented players, yes, but that’s not the only reason they won. They won because they liked each other, knew their roles, ignored statistics and valued winning over everything else. They won because their best players sacrificed to make everyone else happy. They won as long as everyone remained on the same page. By that same token, they lost if any of those three factors weren’t in place.
Simmons calls this principle "The Secret" and says (quoting NBA-great Isiah Thomas), “The secret of basketball is that it’s not about basketball.”
The same principle applies to business. Talent is obviously important, but the ability to work together, check egos at the door, and make individual sacrifices when necessary is the only way a team succeeds.
Think about the business teams you’ve seen fail. Rarely was their failure due to a lack of talent or even the absence of a great idea. More often they failed because of personality conflicts, ego clashes, or competing agendas.
So is the secret of business that it’s not about business?
Not quite. Later in the book Simmons describes The Secret to Hall-of-Famer Bill Walton.
It’s not a secret as much as a choice... Look at the forces pushing you to make the other choice, the wrong choice. It’s all about you. It’s all about material acquisitions, physical gratifications, stats and highlights... And you wouldn’t even know otherwise unless you played with the right player or the right coach…. With a truly great coach, it’s not about a diagram, it’s not about a play, it’s not about a practice, it’s the course of time over history. It’s the impact a coach has on the lives around him.
That's why every great leader makes the same decision. Walton believes success at the highest level in basketball comes down to one question: "Can you make the choice that your happiness can come from someone else’s success?"
If you can make that decision you take the most important step towards becoming a great leader.
No entrepreneur has qualities like courage, vision, charisma, adaptability, and decisiveness in equal measure.
But every great entrepreneur does make the same decision—and so can you.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-one-decision-every-great-entrepreneur-makes.html
What Drives Customer Loyalty Now?
It's time to put away the golf clubs and pull out Google Reader: Sales are no longer just about personal relationships.
If you think customer loyalty is driven by personal relationships or because of your hard work, then not only are you wrong--but you're putting your revenue at risk. The reasons for customer loyalty have changed dramatically in the past decade, according to research published in the book, "The Challenger Sale" by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Relationships and hard work now come in second and third on the list of what customers value most--and what will drive them to change providers.
Instead, customers today are looking for sales people to be experts--not in the products or services that they offer, but rather in the customer's own business. Sales people who can demonstrate that expertise in the sales process are winning big deals away from formerly entrenched competitors.
Here's how customers consider your value, from lowest to highest:
Customers are moving their business from sales people to experts. If you want to be the big winner in your market, you have to increase your expertise and demonstrate that expertise in meaningful ways to your customer.
Here's a course of action.
1. Learn your customer's industry, business challenges and competitors.
You don't have to become an encyclopedia of information to be of increasing value. Instead start with just a few steps:
2. Ask your customers about changes in their industry.
Focus on these four categories: technology, regulation, mergers/acquisitions and innovations. These categories are forward-looking and often are the market drivers with which customers need the greatest help.
3. Suggest how you might help your customers.
Explain how your products and solutions address their upcoming challenges. When you are demonstrating expertise, the language you use is important. Focus on their issues more than your offerings. Use the language of:
Achieving a level of expertise value has a big impact on customer loyalty. Increasing your relevant expertise can help you trump your competitors' hard work and personal relationships.
http://www.inc.com/tom-searcy/what-drives-customers-loyalty.html
If you think customer loyalty is driven by personal relationships or because of your hard work, then not only are you wrong--but you're putting your revenue at risk. The reasons for customer loyalty have changed dramatically in the past decade, according to research published in the book, "The Challenger Sale" by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. Relationships and hard work now come in second and third on the list of what customers value most--and what will drive them to change providers.
Instead, customers today are looking for sales people to be experts--not in the products or services that they offer, but rather in the customer's own business. Sales people who can demonstrate that expertise in the sales process are winning big deals away from formerly entrenched competitors.
Here's how customers consider your value, from lowest to highest:
- If you know your product, you are a human catalog
- If you know your services, you are a technician
- If you can match your products and services to the customer's needs, you are a sales person
- If you know a customer's problems and business, you are a consultant
- If you know a customer's industry, market challenges and competitors, you are an expert
Customers are moving their business from sales people to experts. If you want to be the big winner in your market, you have to increase your expertise and demonstrate that expertise in meaningful ways to your customer.
Here's a course of action.
1. Learn your customer's industry, business challenges and competitors.
You don't have to become an encyclopedia of information to be of increasing value. Instead start with just a few steps:
- Read and subscribe to your customer's industry's top two or three blogs.
- Put keyword notifiers in your Internet search tool for the top three or four key terms for your customer's industry issues.
- Read the trade association newsletters and website materials of your customer's industry.
2. Ask your customers about changes in their industry.
Focus on these four categories: technology, regulation, mergers/acquisitions and innovations. These categories are forward-looking and often are the market drivers with which customers need the greatest help.
3. Suggest how you might help your customers.
Explain how your products and solutions address their upcoming challenges. When you are demonstrating expertise, the language you use is important. Focus on their issues more than your offerings. Use the language of:
- Time: How you can help them to be faster and more responsive to the market and to compliance deadlines.
- Money: Saving and making money is always a motivation for a buyer considering the value of expertise. In addition, there is the measurement of money in relationship to the market. How will working with you change their position in the marketplace in the area of value, price, cost or share?
- Risk: The impending negative impact of something that you point out can be a powerful motivator for action. Loss of market share, penalties for non-compliance and the risk of being technologically overrun by competitors are all threats that can help customers see you as a valuable expert.
Achieving a level of expertise value has a big impact on customer loyalty. Increasing your relevant expertise can help you trump your competitors' hard work and personal relationships.
http://www.inc.com/tom-searcy/what-drives-customers-loyalty.html
12/31/11
7 Steps to Incredible Personal Productivity
Practical advice to turn an average workday into an incredibly productive day.
Occasionally you need to go the extra mile. Sometimes you need to complete a major project, tackle a task you’ve put off, or just knock out a ton of work in one day.
Here’s the best way to turn a normal workday into an incredibly productive workday:
Occasionally you need to go the extra mile. Sometimes you need to complete a major project, tackle a task you’ve put off, or just knock out a ton of work in one day.
Here’s the best way to turn a normal workday into an incredibly productive workday:
- Let everyone know. Interruptions destroy focus and kill productivity. So are the guilt trips your family "sometimes unintentionally" lay on you. Let coworkers and family know you’re planning a “project day.” Tell key customers too. Announce you will be tied up on, say, Tuesday, and that you will respond to calls and emails on Thursday. Let people know who to contact in an emergency. Some will get with you before Tuesday, and the rest will make a mental note you’re not available. In either case, you’re covered.
Plus you get the “peer pressure” benefit: When you tell people you plan to finish a project you will be more likely to see the job through. Peer pressure can be positive motivation harness it.
- Set a target. Don’t plan your project day based on fuzzy parameters like, “I will stay at it as long as possible,” or, “I won’t leave until I no longer feel productive.” Those approaches give you an easy out. Commit to working for as long as you estimate it will take. Pick a number.
There’s a cool benefit to this approach too: The longer the time frame you set the quicker the early hours seem to go by. When I worked in manufacturing we normally worked eight-hour shifts. The hours before lunch seemed endless; the last two hours of the day were even worse. During busy periods we worked twelve hour shifts and the mornings seemed to fly by something about knowing you will be working for a long time allows you to stop checking the clock. When you know you’re in for a long haul your mind automatically adapts. Try it, it works.
- Start unusually early or unusually late. When you step outside your norm, your perspective of time shifts as well. Start at 5 a.m. or revisit your college days and start at 6 p.m. and work through the night. Set the stage for an unusually productive day by dramatically changing your normal routine.
- Delay gratification. Say you like to listen to music while you work. Don’t, at least for the first couple of hours. That way, when your enthusiasm really starts to wane, turning on the music will perk you back up. Hold off on whatever things you use to brighten up your workday, at least for a while. Delayed gratification is always better gratification, and in this case can provide just the spark you need to keep going.
- Refuel and recharge before you need to. When endurance athletes wait until they are thirsty to drink they’ve waited too long. The same premise applies at work. Have a snack a little earlier than normal. Start drinking water right immediately. If you normally sit, stand up before you start to feel stiff or cramped. If you normally stand, sit before your back stiffens or your legs ache. Be proactive so discomfort can’t dampen your motivation or weaken your resolve.
And make sure you plan meals wisely. Don’t take an hour for lunch. Plan food ahead of time that you can prepare and eat quickly. The goal is to refuel, re-hydrate, and keep on rolling. Remember, this is an unusual day treat it that way.
- Don’t take rest breaks. Take productivity breaks. Newton’s Law of Productivity states that a productive person in motion tends to stay in motion. Maintaining momentum is everything. Don’t take a TV or Internet break. Take breaks that reinforce your sense of activity and accomplishment. Take a quick walk and think about what you’re tackling next. Then jump back in. Even a few minutes spent in the land of inactivity make it hard to regain momentum.
- Don’t stop until it’s done. Stopping simply because you’re tired or bored is habit-forming. (Plus you’re always capable of doing more than you think.) If the only barrier to completion is effort or motivation, stay at it and bust through that barrier.
Think about your normal workday; at some point you typically think, “That’s it. That’s all I have in me today.” That limit was set long ago, but it’s an artificial limit based on habit. Pushing through the “pain” is a habit anyone can develop, and when you do, you automatically set your effort limit a little higher making you capable of even more on a regular basis.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/7-steps-to-incredible-personal-productivity.html
12/27/11
Keeping Morale High When Salaries Aren’t
Building a stable team is critical to building success. Here's how to inspire morale and loyalty when you can’t compensate competitively.
TerraCycle’s been around for almost 10 years, and our current business model (collecting non-recyclable waste from schools and organizations and converting it into usable products and materials) is almost 5 years old, but in many ways we still run very much like a start-up.
One area where that is definitely true is compensation.
We pay firmly under market rates across the board, don’t have traditional perks and 2011 was the first year we had health benefits. Yet we’ve built a committed, energetic and positive team that has allowed the company to expand to 19 countries and see double-digit growth year over year.
Here are some of the things we’ve done to keep team morale up when salaries aren’t:
TerraCycle’s been around for almost 10 years, and our current business model (collecting non-recyclable waste from schools and organizations and converting it into usable products and materials) is almost 5 years old, but in many ways we still run very much like a start-up.
One area where that is definitely true is compensation.
We pay firmly under market rates across the board, don’t have traditional perks and 2011 was the first year we had health benefits. Yet we’ve built a committed, energetic and positive team that has allowed the company to expand to 19 countries and see double-digit growth year over year.
Here are some of the things we’ve done to keep team morale up when salaries aren’t:
- Build an environment that empowers every team member. We make sure our team knows they truly own their work and can take on interesting or challenging projects goes a long way towards providing personal fulfillment.
- Be fully transparent. Always communicate with your team about financial goals and the reality of when to expect salary adjustments.
- Make work a place to play. Our office is unlike any other—everything is made from waste, it’s covered in graffiti and any given morning could include a spontaneous Nerf gun battle, testing a cool new product made from waste or having a local elementary school drop by for a tour. Pair this with a flexible PTO policy and it beats working in a traditional office for almost everyone.
4 Business Metrics You Can’t Afford to Ignore
Profit and revenue tell you a lot--but they don't tell you everything about the health of your business.
Every business focuses on and measures revenue. Every business focuses on profit and loss.
And they should, but there are a few other financial and performance measurements that can provide earlier warning signs of trouble—or early indications of longer-term success.
Here are four metrics your business can’t afford to ignore:
Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC). Also known as customer acquisition cost, this measures the cost of landing a customer. In simple terms, add up the cost of marketing and sales—including salaries and overhead—and divide by the number of customers you land during a specific time frame.
Spend $100 and acquire 10 customers and your CAC is $10.
What’s a good number? That depends on your industry and business model. It’s also important to understand how CAC fits into your overall operating budget. The leaner your operation the more you can afford to spend to acquire a customer.
Also keep in mind that a high CAC makes sense if you also generate a high…
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV). Unless your business is truly one-off, some percentage of customers will become repeat customers. The more repeat customers you have, and the more those customers spend, the higher CAC you can afford. (Some business models are built on breaking even on the customer’s first purchase; future purchases will be profitable since the CAC is at or near zero.)
LTV is often tricky to calculate and does involve making a few assumptions, at least during the startup phase. But once you’ve built a little history you can start to spot customer retention and spending trends. Then the math gets a lot easier: Determine what the average customer spends over a specific time period and calculate the return on your original CAC investment. Sense-check that against your profit and loss statement. Roughly speaking, the greater the LTV, the higher CAC you can afford.
Why do these two metrics matter so much? A rising CAC means you’ll need to start cutting costs or raising prices—or do a better job in marketing and sales. A falling LTV indicates the same measures are necessary… and means you’re failing to leverage the most important and least expensive customers you have: current customers.
Churn rate. Every business gains and loses customers; that’s a fact of business life. But still, lost customers are like failed investments. You spent money to acquire them, service them, and try to retain them… and now they’re gone.
A rising churn rate could be caused by a number of factors: Dissatisfaction with your products and services, new competition in your market, or even the coming end of a product or service cycle.
Churn rate is a solid indicator of rising CAC and lower LTV. In fact, all three are great leading indicators of problems—or successes—to come, both in other metrics and for your business overall.
Revenue percentages. Very few businesses only have one source of revenue. Most have multiple sources, and changes in the contribution percentage each makes can indicate problems are ahead.
Take wedding photography, a business I know something about. To keep things simple, say 80 percent of revenue historically comes from the initial wedding package sold to couples, 10 percent from additional sales after the wedding to the couple, and 10 percent from post-wedding sales to friends, family, etc. If post-wedding sales fall off that will impact overall profit levels since almost all marketing and sales costs go into booking weddings so margins on additional sales are naturally much higher.
Changes in revenue percentages can often signal not only changes in customer spending habits but also broader trends in your industry and market.
If you have other key metrics your business follows, share them in the comments below.
Every business focuses on and measures revenue. Every business focuses on profit and loss.
And they should, but there are a few other financial and performance measurements that can provide earlier warning signs of trouble—or early indications of longer-term success.
Here are four metrics your business can’t afford to ignore:
Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC). Also known as customer acquisition cost, this measures the cost of landing a customer. In simple terms, add up the cost of marketing and sales—including salaries and overhead—and divide by the number of customers you land during a specific time frame.
Spend $100 and acquire 10 customers and your CAC is $10.
What’s a good number? That depends on your industry and business model. It’s also important to understand how CAC fits into your overall operating budget. The leaner your operation the more you can afford to spend to acquire a customer.
Also keep in mind that a high CAC makes sense if you also generate a high…
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV). Unless your business is truly one-off, some percentage of customers will become repeat customers. The more repeat customers you have, and the more those customers spend, the higher CAC you can afford. (Some business models are built on breaking even on the customer’s first purchase; future purchases will be profitable since the CAC is at or near zero.)
LTV is often tricky to calculate and does involve making a few assumptions, at least during the startup phase. But once you’ve built a little history you can start to spot customer retention and spending trends. Then the math gets a lot easier: Determine what the average customer spends over a specific time period and calculate the return on your original CAC investment. Sense-check that against your profit and loss statement. Roughly speaking, the greater the LTV, the higher CAC you can afford.
Why do these two metrics matter so much? A rising CAC means you’ll need to start cutting costs or raising prices—or do a better job in marketing and sales. A falling LTV indicates the same measures are necessary… and means you’re failing to leverage the most important and least expensive customers you have: current customers.
Churn rate. Every business gains and loses customers; that’s a fact of business life. But still, lost customers are like failed investments. You spent money to acquire them, service them, and try to retain them… and now they’re gone.
A rising churn rate could be caused by a number of factors: Dissatisfaction with your products and services, new competition in your market, or even the coming end of a product or service cycle.
Churn rate is a solid indicator of rising CAC and lower LTV. In fact, all three are great leading indicators of problems—or successes—to come, both in other metrics and for your business overall.
Revenue percentages. Very few businesses only have one source of revenue. Most have multiple sources, and changes in the contribution percentage each makes can indicate problems are ahead.
Take wedding photography, a business I know something about. To keep things simple, say 80 percent of revenue historically comes from the initial wedding package sold to couples, 10 percent from additional sales after the wedding to the couple, and 10 percent from post-wedding sales to friends, family, etc. If post-wedding sales fall off that will impact overall profit levels since almost all marketing and sales costs go into booking weddings so margins on additional sales are naturally much higher.
Changes in revenue percentages can often signal not only changes in customer spending habits but also broader trends in your industry and market.
If you have other key metrics your business follows, share them in the comments below.
14 Easy Ways to Get Insanely Motivated
These simple strategies will keep you energized through the holidays and well into the new year.
It's getting toward the end of the year, so with the holidays in sight, I thought it appropriate to give you all a little gift: a column that I guarantee will make you more more successful in the coming year.
Here are 14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated:
It's getting toward the end of the year, so with the holidays in sight, I thought it appropriate to give you all a little gift: a column that I guarantee will make you more more successful in the coming year.
Here are 14 quick strategies to get and keep yourself motivated:
- Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts while avoiding negative thoughts.
- Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action. Get your food and exercise budget in place and follow it like a business plan.
- Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time, so hanging with them is like shooting yourself in the foot.
- Seek out the similarly motivated. Their positive energy will rub off on you and you can imitate their success strategies.
- Have goals–but remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete, lest it become more important than achieving the goal.
- Act with a higher purpose. Any activity or action that doesn’t serve your higher goal is wasted effort--and should be avoided.
- Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.
- Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.
- Don't wait for perfection; do it now! Perfectionists are the losers in the game of life. Strive for excellence rather than the unachievable.
- Celebrate your failures. Your most important lessons in life will come from what you don't achieve. Take time to understand where you fell short.
- Don’t take success too seriously. Success can breed tomorrow's failure if you use it as an excuse to become complacent.
- Avoid weak goals. Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with "I'll try ..." Always start with "I will" or "I must."
- Treat inaction as the only real failure. If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can't even learn from the experience.
- Think before you speak. Keep silent rather than express something that doesn’t serve your purpose.
12/19/11
Build a Killer Website: 19 Dos and Don'ts
If you do it right, your website can be the best marketing tool you
have. Ilya Pozin, founder of the Web design firm Ciplex, on how not to
screw it up.
I’m continually surprised by how many people call my design company with very firm ideas about what they want on their business website and yet, they haven’t thought through some of the most basic questions first. For this reason, our first question is always “Why do you need a site?,” not “What do you want on it?”
At bottom your website is a marketing tool. For many businesses, it’s the only source of business. If done right, it can be a major part of yours.
Here’s my quick-hit list of the top dos and don’ts before you get started:
Do:
Don’t:
I’m continually surprised by how many people call my design company with very firm ideas about what they want on their business website and yet, they haven’t thought through some of the most basic questions first. For this reason, our first question is always “Why do you need a site?,” not “What do you want on it?”
At bottom your website is a marketing tool. For many businesses, it’s the only source of business. If done right, it can be a major part of yours.
Here’s my quick-hit list of the top dos and don’ts before you get started:
Do:
- Set smart goals. And make sure they’re measurable. Here are a few great ones a Web designer wants to hear: increase conversion rates, increase sales, generate more leads, reduce overhead, and improve brand awareness.
- Plan on becoming an SEO wizard. Sure, you’re going to want help from the pros and eventually you might even need your own in-house SEO expert, but search engine optimization is something you need to know about too. It has one of the highest ROIs in marketing. Plus, do it right and SEO can literally put your marketing on autopilot, allowing you to focus on improving the quality of your business, instead of figuring out how to bring in customers to your site. Start reading SEOmoz and stay up to date with SEO changes by reading sites like search engine land.
- Use open source tools. You could go with a proprietary content management system (CMS) but that means you’re typically stuck with one company and paying hefty license fees to boot. Do yourself a favor and go with an open-source system—I like WordPress and Magento—that any developer can access.
- Think about your mobile strategy simultaneously. Research the percentage of your visitors that are likely to use mobile devices to access your site. If it’s high, you may want to consider building a separate mobile version of your site, or even an app. If it’s relatively low, just make sure your website works on smart phones, but don’t invest into a mobile version.
- Steal from your competitors. Before you build your site, check out your competitors and write down the things they do well. If you like the look and feel of another site, there’s no reason not to start with something you like and then make it your own.
- Develop your content. The biggest slow-down in the Web design process is content. If you’re going to sell products on your site, get product photos and product descriptions ready. If you sell services, you’ll need a description of each service. Get as much of your content together before you start building your site—it will save you weeks. And while you’re at it…
- Write with calls to action in mind. Good calls to action allow visitors to quickly decide what they want to do next. Having a big sale? Don’t just write a banner that says “50% off all products.” Write one that says “50% off all products, CLICK HERE to view them.”
- Always answer the question “why?” Have you ever walked up to someone you’ve never met, handed them a business card, and walked away without saying a word? Likely not. If you want people to do something on your website, such as sign up for your newsletter, don’t just put up a box that says “enter email” or even “sign up for newsletter”—you’ll get a very weak conversion rate. Tell them why they should do it: “Sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly specials.” Same thing goes for Twitter and Facebook logos. Just putting them up isn’t smart. Tell people why they should follow you on Twitter or friend you on Facebook. What will they get out of it?
- Trust your Web designer. I tend to see the worst end results with customers who come in with a “I know what I want, just do what I tell you” attitude. You hired an expert because they know more than you, right? Let them do what they do best and they’re more likely to meet and often exceed your goals.
Don’t:
- Do it yourself. I know—I run a Web design firm, so of course I’m going to say this. But seriously, your website is often where your customers’ first experience your brand. If it looks homemade, they’re going to make assumptions about your business that you want to avoid.
- Make people think. When visitors come to your website, they typically already know what they want out of it. Do a three-second test: If within three seconds a visitor can’t figure out what to do next, go back to the drawing board.
- Expect visitors. Lose the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Simply putting up your site will not result in any visitors.
- Spend all your money. Don’t max out your entire budget on the website. You can get a well-designed site for under $1,000 from a freelancer, or a few thousand dollars from a professional agency. And you can always make improvements as your business grows. It’s far more important initially to have some money left over for a marketing budget so you can actually make a return on your investment.
- Add a blog. Are you really going to write posts? Be honest. If you won’t, then forget about a blog. A website with an outdated blog can create the perception that your company is small or even out of business.
- Add Twitter and Facebook buttons. If a potential client clicks through to your social pages and sees hardly any followers, they may lose trust in you. First build up your social presence, then commit to posting and engaging your fans on a regular basis, and only then promote them on your website. Also keep in mind that some businesses simply don’t belong on Twitter or Facebook.
- Try to please everyone. Your website will be a mess if you try to accommodate every type of visitor who might come along. Figure out who is likely to be your most frequent users and focus on creating the best experience for them.
- Add testimonials. Building credibility is important, but too often testimonials sound fake. “’They are great!’ says John Smith” simply isn’t believable. If you’re going to have testimonials make sure they are specific, and something people can relate to.
- Use Flash. Some sites still need it, but if you can, avoid it. Adobe just announced that it will no longer support Flash on mobile devices and set-top-boxes. The last thing you want is for a potential customer to be unable to open your site.
- Expect a killer website overnight. Good websites take time to build. If you want the best results out of your site, be prepared for several months of work.
7 Things Highly Productive People Do
You have more important things to focus on than, um, focusing. Get back on track with these tips.
You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction. Why do you think you check your email so much?
Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.
Easier said than done, I know.
Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.
Here are his tips for staying productive:
You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction. Why do you think you check your email so much?
Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.
Easier said than done, I know.
Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.
Here are his tips for staying productive:
- Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
- Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).
- Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
- Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
- Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.
- Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day.
- Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.
Your Primary Limitation? You're Ignorant
How knowing that you don't know much can help you make smarter decisions.
You probably don't know nearly as much as you think you do. I certainly don't. In the spectrum of knowledge even the most insightful human only sees a sliver of light.
Here's the beginning of a long list of what you—and all entrepreneurs—don't know:
So how are we able to make decisions?
In our heart-of-hearts we all believe that we make decisions about our personal lives and work based upon the facts—our understanding of the context of the choice. But if you think about it, we typically make decisions based upon only a sliver of what we actually need to know.
"It's a good idea to buy this house because it suits my needs and the value is lower than it was last year."
Well, what happens when you discover your wife is pregnant with twins, the local mayor is thinking about proposing a tax hike next week, your boss is thinking about relocating you to another country, or a flood is on its way?
"I should target kids as customers because they're in need of my product."
Well, what happens when you discover that one of your suppliers put lead in the plastic, grandmas love your product even more than kids, or a competitor you've never heard of is on the verge of launching a slightly better, faster, cheaper version of what you built (and oh yeah…she patented it)?
When you start to think about what you don't know it might seem a bit paralyzing. If you don't know nearly enough to make a decision, how can you continue to run your business?
The answer: You can continue to operate. You can continue to move quickly. But, you have to do so knowing your primary limitation: You're ignorant. You don't know much of anything.
So what does knowing that you don't know much tell you? A few things:
http://www.inc.com/mark-peter-davis/your-primary-limitation-youre-ignorant.html
You probably don't know nearly as much as you think you do. I certainly don't. In the spectrum of knowledge even the most insightful human only sees a sliver of light.
Here's the beginning of a long list of what you—and all entrepreneurs—don't know:
- What people are feeling in other parts of the world
- What folks are concerned about elsewhere in your city
- What is happening outside of your front door
- What the whole story is behind anything you are told
- What's happening right behind you
- What your body is doing right now
- Why you have your worldview
So how are we able to make decisions?
In our heart-of-hearts we all believe that we make decisions about our personal lives and work based upon the facts—our understanding of the context of the choice. But if you think about it, we typically make decisions based upon only a sliver of what we actually need to know.
"It's a good idea to buy this house because it suits my needs and the value is lower than it was last year."
Well, what happens when you discover your wife is pregnant with twins, the local mayor is thinking about proposing a tax hike next week, your boss is thinking about relocating you to another country, or a flood is on its way?
"I should target kids as customers because they're in need of my product."
Well, what happens when you discover that one of your suppliers put lead in the plastic, grandmas love your product even more than kids, or a competitor you've never heard of is on the verge of launching a slightly better, faster, cheaper version of what you built (and oh yeah…she patented it)?
When you start to think about what you don't know it might seem a bit paralyzing. If you don't know nearly enough to make a decision, how can you continue to run your business?
The answer: You can continue to operate. You can continue to move quickly. But, you have to do so knowing your primary limitation: You're ignorant. You don't know much of anything.
So what does knowing that you don't know much tell you? A few things:
- You need to listen…a lot.
- You're going to get it wrong.
- You should be ready to change directions when you do get it wrong.
- You need to be ready to forgive yourself for screwing up.
http://www.inc.com/mark-peter-davis/your-primary-limitation-youre-ignorant.html
This One Mistake Can Eat Your Business Alive
P&L targets are supposed to help a company create more value. But
used incorrectly, they can erode business value and consume growth
opportunities from the inside.
We saw a business recently that was being “eaten” by its P&L targets. Sounds crazy, right?
Targets and goal-setting are supposed to help a company develop effective strategies and employ the capital and resources necessary to create more value. But in this case, the targets were eroding business value and, as a result, the CEO was losing control of the company.
How was this possible? First of all, this business is owned by a larger corporate entity but operates autonomously to set targets and deploy capital. This is a common situation in which a larger organization—which could be a parent company, a private equity firm, or even an absent owner—controls the capital allocation but allows the management team to run the business. Management agrees to financial targets with the parent company, then attempts to meet or exceed the targets.
The problem for this company, as with many businesses in the same boat, is that the parent company expected a constant year-over-year growth rate of around 6 percent bottom-line growth.
Most of us who manage growing businesses know that with the right strategic investments, it’s entirely possible to get 6 percent or higher top-line growth, even in slower-growth markets. But to do so, you often have to invest, in resources such as new salespeople and R&D, which often drives down short-term profits in exchange for achieving a higher long-term growth trajectory.
Delivering annual 6 percent increases in profits, however, is a different matter entirely. Because the subsidiary’s management team could not make a valid case for growth investment to its parent (or shareholders), it had to commit to 6 percent profit growth year-over-year—in a market that was growing 3 percent annually.
Guess what came next? Cost-cutting. And where was the easiest place to cut costs? The sales force and R&D department—the same places where the business needed to invest to create growth.
The result was that the growth-oriented CEO was slowly losing a turf battle to the cost-oriented CFO. Every time the CEO wanted to invest in the sales force to develop more business, the CFO countered with a plan to cut salespeople. Guess who won every time?
Fortunately, the CEO has changed the game. He is in the process of implementing a plan for growth that is endorsed by his shareholders—in this case, the parent company. The fundamental mistake this business made was not pitching a fact-based plan to the parent company for moderate, long-term growth. Only later he realized that the parent company actually had money to burn in the form of a growing cash account—which was funded in part by squeezing costs out of the business. Once he convinced his shareholders of a fact-based plan that created a significant return on the capital invested, they bought it and gave him the runway to execute it.
No business can cut its way to growth. Eventually, the P&L targets will eat you alive.
http://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/this-one-mistake-can-eat-your-business-alive.html
We saw a business recently that was being “eaten” by its P&L targets. Sounds crazy, right?
Targets and goal-setting are supposed to help a company develop effective strategies and employ the capital and resources necessary to create more value. But in this case, the targets were eroding business value and, as a result, the CEO was losing control of the company.
How was this possible? First of all, this business is owned by a larger corporate entity but operates autonomously to set targets and deploy capital. This is a common situation in which a larger organization—which could be a parent company, a private equity firm, or even an absent owner—controls the capital allocation but allows the management team to run the business. Management agrees to financial targets with the parent company, then attempts to meet or exceed the targets.
The problem for this company, as with many businesses in the same boat, is that the parent company expected a constant year-over-year growth rate of around 6 percent bottom-line growth.
Most of us who manage growing businesses know that with the right strategic investments, it’s entirely possible to get 6 percent or higher top-line growth, even in slower-growth markets. But to do so, you often have to invest, in resources such as new salespeople and R&D, which often drives down short-term profits in exchange for achieving a higher long-term growth trajectory.
Delivering annual 6 percent increases in profits, however, is a different matter entirely. Because the subsidiary’s management team could not make a valid case for growth investment to its parent (or shareholders), it had to commit to 6 percent profit growth year-over-year—in a market that was growing 3 percent annually.
Guess what came next? Cost-cutting. And where was the easiest place to cut costs? The sales force and R&D department—the same places where the business needed to invest to create growth.
The result was that the growth-oriented CEO was slowly losing a turf battle to the cost-oriented CFO. Every time the CEO wanted to invest in the sales force to develop more business, the CFO countered with a plan to cut salespeople. Guess who won every time?
Fortunately, the CEO has changed the game. He is in the process of implementing a plan for growth that is endorsed by his shareholders—in this case, the parent company. The fundamental mistake this business made was not pitching a fact-based plan to the parent company for moderate, long-term growth. Only later he realized that the parent company actually had money to burn in the form of a growing cash account—which was funded in part by squeezing costs out of the business. Once he convinced his shareholders of a fact-based plan that created a significant return on the capital invested, they bought it and gave him the runway to execute it.
No business can cut its way to growth. Eventually, the P&L targets will eat you alive.
http://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/this-one-mistake-can-eat-your-business-alive.html
How to Stop Hovering as a Helicopter Parent
The more a parent trusts, believes and has confidence in their child’s decision making when they are away from the parent, the less controlling the parent needs to be.
Problem: Helicopter parents are usually driven by anxiety and not being able to leave anything to chance. It’s usually something they learned from one of their parents. As a result they are overly involved running their children’s lives. Over time the child will either become angrily defiant because of an internal need to feel independent or if the parent is too much of a helicopter parent the child may lose initiative, because they may feel that whatever they come up with as in thinking or doing, their parent will always jump in and force their point of view on the child. The sad thing is that the parent does not see themselves as controlling and intrusive, but as loving and caring. And if the parent does recognize that they may be, they usually don’t see it as important enough to change (usually because their anxiety overrides this).
Solution: The more a parent trusts, believes and has confidence in their child’s decision making when they are away from the parent, the less controlling the parent needs to be. To achieve that the parent should have conversations with their child when they are driving together (vs. face to face giving advice the child doesn’t want) such as: “How can you tell which kid in your class is likely to get into real trouble this year? And why?” Then just listen to your child and don’t give advice. Instead say, “Hmmm, that’s really interesting.” Another question might be: “How can you tell the difference between a class at school that you can study for at the last minute and one that you need to stay on top of?” Again, respond to their answer with, “Hmmm. Really! That’s interesting.” In each of these cases you are helping your child develop judgment and improve their decision making skills. When you see them doing that, you will become less anxious when you are away from them and less controlling.
http://markgoulston.com/usable-insight-how-to-stop-hovering-as-a-helicopter-parent/
Problem: Helicopter parents are usually driven by anxiety and not being able to leave anything to chance. It’s usually something they learned from one of their parents. As a result they are overly involved running their children’s lives. Over time the child will either become angrily defiant because of an internal need to feel independent or if the parent is too much of a helicopter parent the child may lose initiative, because they may feel that whatever they come up with as in thinking or doing, their parent will always jump in and force their point of view on the child. The sad thing is that the parent does not see themselves as controlling and intrusive, but as loving and caring. And if the parent does recognize that they may be, they usually don’t see it as important enough to change (usually because their anxiety overrides this).
Solution: The more a parent trusts, believes and has confidence in their child’s decision making when they are away from the parent, the less controlling the parent needs to be. To achieve that the parent should have conversations with their child when they are driving together (vs. face to face giving advice the child doesn’t want) such as: “How can you tell which kid in your class is likely to get into real trouble this year? And why?” Then just listen to your child and don’t give advice. Instead say, “Hmmm, that’s really interesting.” Another question might be: “How can you tell the difference between a class at school that you can study for at the last minute and one that you need to stay on top of?” Again, respond to their answer with, “Hmmm. Really! That’s interesting.” In each of these cases you are helping your child develop judgment and improve their decision making skills. When you see them doing that, you will become less anxious when you are away from them and less controlling.
http://markgoulston.com/usable-insight-how-to-stop-hovering-as-a-helicopter-parent/
12/16/11
9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money
The ability to motivate employees is one of the greatest
skills an entrepreneur can possess. Two years ago, I realized I didn’t
have this skill. So I hired a CEO who did.
Josh had 12 years in the corporate world, which included running a major department at Comcast. I knew he was seasoned, but I was still skeptical at first. We were going through some tough growing pains, and I thought that a lack of cash would make it extremely difficult to improve the company morale.
I was wrong.
With his help and the help of the great team leaders he put in place, Josh not only rebuilt the culture, but also created a passionate, hard-working team that is as committed to growing and improving the company as I am.
Here are nine things I learned from him:
Josh had 12 years in the corporate world, which included running a major department at Comcast. I knew he was seasoned, but I was still skeptical at first. We were going through some tough growing pains, and I thought that a lack of cash would make it extremely difficult to improve the company morale.
I was wrong.
With his help and the help of the great team leaders he put in place, Josh not only rebuilt the culture, but also created a passionate, hard-working team that is as committed to growing and improving the company as I am.
Here are nine things I learned from him:
- Be generous with praise. Everyone wants it and it’s one of the easiest things to give. Plus, praise from the CEO goes a lot farther than you might think. Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Once you’re comfortable delivering praise one-on-one to an employee, try praising them in front of others.
- Get rid of the managers. Projects without project managers? That doesn’t seem right! Try it. Removing the project lead or supervisor and empowering your staff to work together as a team rather then everyone reporting to one individual can do wonders. Think about it. What’s worse than letting your supervisor down? Letting your team down! Allowing people to work together as a team, on an equal level with their co-workers, will often produce better projects faster. People will come in early, stay late, and devote more of their energy to solving problems.
- Make your ideas theirs. People hate being told what to do. Instead of telling people what you want done; ask them in a way that will make them feel like they came up with the idea. “I’d like you to do it this way” turns into “Do you think it’s a good idea if we do it this way?”
- Never criticize or correct. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear that they did something wrong. If you’re looking for a de-motivator, this is it. Try an indirect approach to get people to improve, learn from their mistakes, and fix them. Ask, “Was that the best way to approach the problem? Why not? Have any ideas on what you could have done differently?” Then you’re having a conversation and talking through solutions, not pointing a finger.
- Make everyone a leader. Highlight your top performers’ strengths and let them know that because of their excellence, you want them to be the example for others. You’ll set the bar high and they’ll be motivated to live up to their reputation as a leader.
- Take an employee to lunch once a week. Surprise them. Don’t make an announcement that you’re establishing a new policy. Literally walk up to one of your employees, and invite them to lunch with you. It’s an easy way to remind them that you notice and appreciate their work.
- Give recognition and small rewards. These two things come in many forms: Give a shout out to someone in a company meeting for what she has accomplished. Run contests or internal games and keep track of the results on a whiteboard that everyone can see. Tangible awards that don’t break the bank can work too. Try things like dinner, trophies, spa services, and plaques.
- Throw company parties. Doing things as a group can go a long way. Have a company picnic. Organize birthday parties. Hold a happy hour. Don’t just wait until the holidays to do a company activity; organize events throughout the year to remind your staff that you’re all in it together.
- Share the rewards—and the pain. When your company does well, celebrate. This is the best time to let everyone know that you’re thankful for their hard work. Go out of your way to show how far you will go when people help your company succeed. If there are disappointments, share those too. If you expect high performance, your team deserves to know where the company stands. Be honest and transparent.
10 Tips from a Successful Small Business Owner
Small business owners wear a million different hats. From product development to customer service to order fulfillment to basic HR functions, you do it all in the course of a typical day. But how do you ensure the success of your business when you're focused so much on day-to-day survival? We talked to successful small business owners to see what advice they had to share, and we've pulled their best tips together right here.
10. Create systems that can run without you.
As a small business owner, you provide the heart, soul, mind, and muscle that keeps your business running, so the idea of your company running without you can be difficult to accept. But as hard as it is to relinquish control, it's essential if your business is to grow to the next level. There are only so many hours in the day, and one person (even one extremely dedicated person) can only do so much. Be sure that the information and knowledge you possess exists somewhere besides your own brain. If there are critical skills that you alone possess, train your people to do them better than you do, and see how much faster your company can move when there are more hands to share the important work.
9. Hire great employees, then get out of their way.
It can be intimidating to hire and work with people who you're pretty sure are smarter than you are. But just as keeping key information to yourself restricts the growth of your business, so does burying yourself in the minutiae of day-to-day operations. Train your employees well, listen to their ideas, and give yourself the freedom to move on to strategic pursuits such as growth planning and business development that will ensure your company's long-term viability.
8. Set specific goals, then take time to review them.
You’re busy all day, every day, but are you moving in a positive direction, or simply spinning your wheels? Take some time every quarter, or at least once a year, to review the goals you’ve set for your business, measure your progress toward them, then adjust as necessary.
7. Create a culture that you would want to work in.
Small businesses are vital to our local communities and our national economy, but small and family-run businesses are also notorious for being difficult to work for, due in part to the complicated dynamic that often exists among company principles. If you have one or more business partners, hash out any differences behind closed doors and present a united front to your employees and customers. Even if you’re the only one in charge, think about the work climate in your office. Are your employees smiling and energetic, or tense and stressed out? If you don’t like what you see, ask for feedback, and be willing to act on it.
6. Invest in improving yourself.
If there’s a core area of your business that’s lacking, find ways to make it better. Work with a business coach to set and achieve realistic goals. Look for workshops or webinars on sales strategies or customer relationship management. Talk with others in your industry about tools and technologies that help them save time and money, then invest in training on those that might benefit you. Knowing when to call in the experts can help you move beyond your comfort zone to become a more well-rounded business manager.
5. Don’t waste your time on tasks that you can outsource.
If you’re still keeping your own books, doing your own taxes, and managing employee work schedules in a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet, you might not be using your time as efficiently as you could. Consider hiring a part-time bookkeeper, retaining an accountant, and using an online scheduling application to let employees create and maintain their own schedules. You can even outsource functions such as staffing, payroll processing, invoicing, and collections, as well as certain aspects of the sales cycle, like lead generation and appointment setting. Think about how much time these tasks consume over the course of a typical day, week, or month, then decide whether your energies would be better spent on more strategic projects.
4. Stick to your core business.
Develop a set of core business principles, then live by them. Begin by identifying your unique selling proposition (What product or service do you provide that differentiates your company from any other business?) and defining who your core customer is (and is not!). If you're having trouble committing to one core service or market, consider working with a business consultant until the path seems clear. This could very well be a situation where it pays to call in the experts!
3. Always know where you stand financially.
This one may seem obvious, but many a small business has failed because the owners, although experts in the service they provided, were novices at managing the money. Create a detailed profit and loss (P&L) statement that tracks your revenues and expenditures, and always keep current on loan payments, small business credit cards, and other accounts payable, as well as invoicing and receivables.
2. Find a partner.
While many entrepreneurs are autonomous by their very nature, there's a great deal of truth to the saying that two heads are better than one. A carefully selected business partner can be a source of ideas, a sounding board, another set of hands, and a counterpart to your own management strengths and weaknesses.
1. Do whatever it takes to achieve that elusive work-life balance.
Force yourself to take a day off, schedule a real vacation, and, above all, remember why it was you started your own business in the first place. Long hours come with the territory, but if you barely recognize your children and your work life has all but consumed any semblance of a personal life, it might be time to reevaluate your priorities. As a small business owner, you could probably find enough work to fill a 37-hour day, so it's important to make a conscious decision to step away from it frequently enough that you avoid burning out or damaging your personal relationships.
http://www.inkfromchase.com/business-tips/
10. Create systems that can run without you.
As a small business owner, you provide the heart, soul, mind, and muscle that keeps your business running, so the idea of your company running without you can be difficult to accept. But as hard as it is to relinquish control, it's essential if your business is to grow to the next level. There are only so many hours in the day, and one person (even one extremely dedicated person) can only do so much. Be sure that the information and knowledge you possess exists somewhere besides your own brain. If there are critical skills that you alone possess, train your people to do them better than you do, and see how much faster your company can move when there are more hands to share the important work.
9. Hire great employees, then get out of their way.
It can be intimidating to hire and work with people who you're pretty sure are smarter than you are. But just as keeping key information to yourself restricts the growth of your business, so does burying yourself in the minutiae of day-to-day operations. Train your employees well, listen to their ideas, and give yourself the freedom to move on to strategic pursuits such as growth planning and business development that will ensure your company's long-term viability.
8. Set specific goals, then take time to review them.
You’re busy all day, every day, but are you moving in a positive direction, or simply spinning your wheels? Take some time every quarter, or at least once a year, to review the goals you’ve set for your business, measure your progress toward them, then adjust as necessary.
7. Create a culture that you would want to work in.
Small businesses are vital to our local communities and our national economy, but small and family-run businesses are also notorious for being difficult to work for, due in part to the complicated dynamic that often exists among company principles. If you have one or more business partners, hash out any differences behind closed doors and present a united front to your employees and customers. Even if you’re the only one in charge, think about the work climate in your office. Are your employees smiling and energetic, or tense and stressed out? If you don’t like what you see, ask for feedback, and be willing to act on it.
6. Invest in improving yourself.
If there’s a core area of your business that’s lacking, find ways to make it better. Work with a business coach to set and achieve realistic goals. Look for workshops or webinars on sales strategies or customer relationship management. Talk with others in your industry about tools and technologies that help them save time and money, then invest in training on those that might benefit you. Knowing when to call in the experts can help you move beyond your comfort zone to become a more well-rounded business manager.
5. Don’t waste your time on tasks that you can outsource.
If you’re still keeping your own books, doing your own taxes, and managing employee work schedules in a cumbersome Excel spreadsheet, you might not be using your time as efficiently as you could. Consider hiring a part-time bookkeeper, retaining an accountant, and using an online scheduling application to let employees create and maintain their own schedules. You can even outsource functions such as staffing, payroll processing, invoicing, and collections, as well as certain aspects of the sales cycle, like lead generation and appointment setting. Think about how much time these tasks consume over the course of a typical day, week, or month, then decide whether your energies would be better spent on more strategic projects.
4. Stick to your core business.
Develop a set of core business principles, then live by them. Begin by identifying your unique selling proposition (What product or service do you provide that differentiates your company from any other business?) and defining who your core customer is (and is not!). If you're having trouble committing to one core service or market, consider working with a business consultant until the path seems clear. This could very well be a situation where it pays to call in the experts!
3. Always know where you stand financially.
This one may seem obvious, but many a small business has failed because the owners, although experts in the service they provided, were novices at managing the money. Create a detailed profit and loss (P&L) statement that tracks your revenues and expenditures, and always keep current on loan payments, small business credit cards, and other accounts payable, as well as invoicing and receivables.
2. Find a partner.
While many entrepreneurs are autonomous by their very nature, there's a great deal of truth to the saying that two heads are better than one. A carefully selected business partner can be a source of ideas, a sounding board, another set of hands, and a counterpart to your own management strengths and weaknesses.
1. Do whatever it takes to achieve that elusive work-life balance.
Force yourself to take a day off, schedule a real vacation, and, above all, remember why it was you started your own business in the first place. Long hours come with the territory, but if you barely recognize your children and your work life has all but consumed any semblance of a personal life, it might be time to reevaluate your priorities. As a small business owner, you could probably find enough work to fill a 37-hour day, so it's important to make a conscious decision to step away from it frequently enough that you avoid burning out or damaging your personal relationships.
http://www.inkfromchase.com/business-tips/
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