Or else what?

One of the challenges of entrepreneurial business is that there are lots of ways to do it wrong. If you do not plan and execute your business strategy correctly, here are examples of what could happen instead:

Focus – All too often, people are starting their own business in order that “no one is going to tell me what to do.” That’s not the foundation for business success.

SO – be sure you’re in business to solve a customer’s needs, in a way you enjoy using your mind and your energy. That’s the way to get a business that can grow.

Customers – The smartest business builders have learned it doesn’t matter what you’re interested in – what matters is what the buyer is interested in. And you won’t learn that unless you get into the mind of your prospect

SO – devote at least 10 hours every week to getting away from working ‘in’ your business. You need to talk to prospects, current customers and invite them to share their most pressing challenges, frustrations and dreams so you’ll know exactly what to offer them.

Productivity – If you’re doing it all yourself, you better be a sole practitioner accountant or attorney, or creating an internet business. That’s about the only way to create enough sales revenue from the 2,000-3,000 hours of energy you’ve got to put into a business each year.

SO – if you’ve got a product or service with growth plans bigger than that, get others onboard NOW to start handing off the repetitive work, so you can be driving sales and marketing activities, and designing your next product or service.

Profitability – Remember that “so no one will tell me what to do” attitude. I’ve seen business owners actually keep paying to keep their doors open, operating at a loss, for years. Profits come from providing what someone wants to buy for more than the cost of being in business

SO – use your time, intelligence and energy to deliver what people want to buy at a price that will add to your bank account.

Get these business building gems right and you’ll have all the freedom you want for the rest of your live.

Over the years of consulting and coaching business owners and entrepreneurs, I’ve uncovered quite a few ways to mess up your efforts. Below you’ll find the top 7 ways to mess up, and what to do about it.

Top 7 Ways To Screw Up Your Business

1. It’s all about you – most people believe they‘re in business to sell what they’re interested in putting out in the world. Do you think your buyer really cars about this?

What to do instead – Your business is all about your prospective customer and what is in it for them. Tell them.

2. Being a “Do It All” – I also see professionals and business owners try to do everything so they’ll know it was done right. Silly idea.

What to do instead – Leverage others. Hire others to hand off lower level work so you can focus on business building.

3. Being a “Know It All” – I’ve seen people assume they know how to do everything. Yep, even thought they have no way of knowing the new and improved technique that might be out there.

What to do instead – Hire for the experience and expertise people have gained in other companies. Now that’s leverage!

4. Meeting hell – Yep, I’ve seen 100s of companies waste 1000s of hours of people’s time, energy and intelligence in worthless meetings. C’mon, you have too.

What to do instead – Never start a meeting if you cannot describe the single result you want to create by the end.

5. Ad Hoc Hell – I’ve seen it. People letting themselves be interrupted constantly by others who have ‘just a quick question.’

What to do instead – Use time blocking and create uninterruptible slots at least 3 times every day.

6. Technology Interruptions – Just because someone invented email and cell phones doesn’t mean they should command your attention.

What to do instead – Turn off both for 2 hours. Then check and answer what needs your attention AND turn them off again to keep working.

7. Getting lost in To Do’s – All too often our personal list becomes a mile long and swamps our attention.

What to do instead – Pick 3 to 6 items that will be the focus or your day. Delegate the rest.

Technorati Tags: Meeting Management, Productivity, team building

That way your entire team’s productivity will soar as they work together. Not only will their effectiveness in the group improve, but also their independent work in your business.

One of the things I like to do is simplify the team forming process. Instead of elaborate team building exercises (like falling out of trees into each other’s arms) I encourage team building take place by focusing on a relevant business issue to solve.

I broke the team forming process down into simple steps: It’s C, B, A: Challenge, Back story, and Action plan

•    Lay out the business matter that needs solving in no more than 10 sentences
•    Have each person share where they came from personally and professionally that made them a fit for the team
•    Create a written plan of action with each person’s contribution to the issue and the target deadlines for each piece of work to be done.

This is not the time for speech making. It’s the time to describe the challenge, the game board that the team will be using and the objective of the game itself: what precisely needs to be solves.

The back story part is so easy. It’s one of the strongest moments in team building as it provides the background that everyone else on the team will use for relationship building. They get to hear each other’s way of speaking as well as the practical information that shapes each person’s credibility for being on the team.

It’s vital us use meeting agendas and written action steps to tie a team’s accountability to each other.

Some of you out there are used to pushing away from a discussion and assuming everyone will go off and do what was described. In reality, a written action plan is the only way to be certain that actions don’t get bumped to the back burner, or reinterpreted after the meeting, or forgotten altogether.

Use the C, B, A approach and your team will gel rapidly and stay on focus for accomplishing their target.

Technorati Tags: Action Plan, Entrepreneur, Teams

Focus
Being able to stay focused is the first key to small business success. There will always be new options, new opportunities, new markets you ‘could’ take your products and services to. The quickest and easiest way to build success is by having a clear focus and checking to make sure all your efforts are aligned.

There is always more that could be added to your To Do list, but are those tasks adding value? Double check daily that the actions you’re giving your time to will build the business results you’re aiming for.

Leverage
One of the ongoing challenges for every small business is getting it all done. If your vision is to grow your business, you need to practice ‘not doing’ – not doing it all your self, not doing what doesn’t actually need doing. Leverage means setting up systems for how things are best done, so that they can be handed off to other people.

Another form of leverage is hiring others, whether part-time or full-time, to take over those systems and activities. Using both of those forms of leverage will free you up to be doing exactly what you need to accomplish on behalf of your business.

Leadership
How do you envision your role in your business? Is it as a team member or a team leader? If it’s the former you’re playing small. Every team needs great members, but team success depends on a leader who make sure the resources the teams needs are available, and the obstacles get cleared out of the way. Be the leader.

Management
No matter the size of your business, you need to carve out time for working ‘on’ your business rather than ‘in’ it. That means putting together the plans that will be road maps for everyone’s efforts. Once you have those plans, it’s your turn to make sure you’ve got the resources your business needs to get the work done. And as work is taking place, you need to monitor how things are going so you know what to adjust.

Passion
Let’s not forget, as you become absorbed in the doing, you need reminders of why you’re in business in the first place. Keep your life vision and your business vision in your line of sight on a regular basis so that you can draw on the inspiration to sustain your balance!

And one way to grow your business to the next level is to join the Business Accelerator TeleSeminar Club at http://www.TheBusinessAcceleratorClub.com – come on board and join for $200 savings the first month.

Come join me and like-minded business builders and learn all about how to run your current business ever easier, AND how to take your experience & expertise and turn it into – Programs, Products & Services Your Clients Are Hungry For – with all the how to’s set out for you.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management

In the same way that kids will gravitate to their favorite games at recess – the average business owner cannot resist making the same mistakes over and over again.

I was reminded of that habit we all share as I sat across the desk from one of my clients this past week. I’ll call him Fred. He’s the owner of a multi-million dollar business who cam eto me to get coached on how to get different results from his management team.

I have to admit that I love the clients I draw – they’re forward focused and action oriented.

Quite often, in fact many times, just like at this meeting, they’re also fed up. AND as we all know, when we’re frustrated we don’t have much patience. For the third or fourth time, Fred was telling me how he wanted me to turn his folks into more effective managers… but that he didn’t intend to change anything HE is doing.

When we’re in that state we very often are making 3 critical mistakes.

Mistake Number 1 – “Wishing” It All Could Be Reality

Fred, you and I all got messages from others in our life that we ought to ‘wish’ for what we want. From the time when an adult held a lit candle on top of a cake in front of us and said “Blow!” we each were taught that wishing is a path to achieving.

In fact wishing and a dime used to get you a cup of coffe… but not even a sip these days!

The heart of this mistake is believing on a sub-conscious level that if we wish hard enough, often enough, loud enough, then some mysterious unknown source will make it be so. I’ve found most ‘wishers’ are in an emotional state, and their attention is on an emotional mental image of what they want ‘different’ to look like.

Well, whether you ‘wish’ each morning, or before walking into a meeting with people who can’t stay on topic for a discussion, or while looking at your bottom line results on a report. Wishes are merely the spark of the begining of the notion of the ‘different’ result you want.

Mistake Number 2 – “Hoping” For A Different Result

Hoping has a different feel to it than wishing.

When I ask people where in their body they feel sensation when they are wishing and when they are hoping, they point to distinctly different locations. When I’ve probed the differences in the mental and emotional states at the route of these mistakes, they report that hoping feels more physcial, visceral, tied to our muscles, as if we’re a child looking longingly down the road and waiting.

Physical instead of mental. Yet also sitting and stewing in an emotional state, rather than taking ownership of the situation.

Mistake Number 3 – “Praying” For 3rd Party Rescue

I’m very fond of uncovering this mistake in my clients and program participants. It’s been massaged so many ways over the past 20 years – from praying to a diety to make things work out the way we want, to ‘making requests’ of our Higher Self, to a childlike reciting of affirmations over and over again.

The common thread in each of these mistakes is people are living in a sense of the entire situation being ‘outside’ of them.

So here is my client sitting across from me… years of pent up frustration rippling through his skin. He’s sick and tired of acting like a referee. Yet as an entrepreneur he both wants his judgement and opinions to guide the actions and decisions of his team. AND he also wants them to decide for themselves that they ought to change their behavior… even in the face of his conduct remaining constant.

You can see how he’s locating all the changes that are needed ‘outside’ of himself.

Oh, by the way – you may be making the same wishing, hoping and praying mistakes!

Fred tells his people at full voice that he cannot understand why they “don’t get it.” That hasn’t worked for him this far, no matter how loudly or frequently he tells his team they aren’t living up to his expectations.

We’ll be working on creating a believable shift in Fred’s behavior so that he can shift from his childlike habits to adulthood.

From that space, he can invite the others on his team to try new ones themselves. We’ll be starting by creating a shared vision of the incremental changes for each of them to make, AND we’ll be naming the specific changes in behavior that will create more effective managing by each of them, and teaming among them.

Technorati Tags: Management

Pearl S. Buck

I’m a voracious reader. There have been some years when I read nearly 400 books… and worked full time and slept fewer than 4 hours a night. I love reading.

That was then… And now my body wants more sleep, and my reading has dropped off. So I use my reading time even more focused. 20 percent for pleasure and 80 percent for the joy of new ideas that I can take to my clients.

I don’t usually take the entire book or article for them to read. I extract the core idea, perhaps even a quote, and take it into a discussion to illustrate a new way of thinking about their challenge.

I have favorites that I give to management teams whose companies are facing growth challenges, leadership practices, and marketing. Those include the

• Harvard Business Review article by Larry Greiner “Evolution & Revolution as organizations grow” (I prefer the original version, not the updated one),
• Fast Company’s piece called “Measure What Matters”
• Inc Magazine’s “Cold Fish, Hot Data, New Profis”
• Fast Company’s “Start With Nothing”
• And Fortune Magazine’s “Making The Lord’s Copies”

If you get yourself a copy of these, you’ll find the following core ideas:

The changes you make to improve operations, at one stage of your company’s growth, actually create the seeds of the breakdowns that will happen during its next stages. Every time, guaranteed. So never announce a change is ‘final’ or ‘perfect.’ You WILL be eating your words if your business continues to grow.

Your company’s excellence will outpace the competition by the degree to which you get at the heart of what your customer values, rather than what your industry standard tells you to focus on. Base your metrics on what your clients want you to deliver, and tie individual goals for every person in your organization to those metrics.

If you pay attention to the unusual requests made by clients you may find that you have data at your finger tips that customers will actually pay you for. You might find yourself with a highly profitable new product or service with little need to add infrastructure or staff to satisfy the needs for information.

Beware launching that ‘absolutely perfect’ new business concept. Be it product or service, first interview prospective customers for their reactions and ideas. They may suggest a complete redesign or a highly profitable refinement saving you time and expense down the line.

Even the monks have to rethink their business model. Once upon the time they produced and distributed a fluid call ‘wine.’ Today, it’s printer inks. The same controlled manufacturing of fluids. New markets and profit margins.

Those are just for starters. Last week I quoted a Fortune magazine discussion about performance measurement from Coach Campbell’s playbook. He uses a review system that measures four areas:

1. On-the-job performance
2. Peer group relationships
3. Innovation best practices, and
4. Management & Leadership that develops the people who report to you

I really love when I find ideas in Discover Magazine… Discussions in the world of Science often break through old thinking about systems, relationships, and more.

And I haven’t even started to list my favorite books of the past few years. One of those is Malcolm Gladwell’s fabulous “The Tipping Point.” His explanations of how viruses and fads are spread through the same trigger point has accompanied me into meetings with a luxury desert chef, the VP of marketing of a commodity with a new product to launch, a serial entrepreneur with a real estate concept, and even a regional CPA firm’s head of Audit Services.

One idea – build relationships with people who are connected to a huge pool of relationships – with many applications in many industries from toys to data marketing.

So as I head for my vacation this year, I’ll have my usual stash of magazines from the past couple of weeks to read on the airplane with marking pen in hand. I’ll also have a business book… and two blouse-rippers just for the diversion of it all.

I know that I’ll probably find 30-40 ideas to bring back with me for my teleseminars, coaching clubs, corporate consulting and newsletter articles.

It might be chancy waiting for my next ideas. My suggestion? Subscribe to three periodicals that have nothing to do with your product or industry, keep them in the bathroom next to the toilet or take them with you to read on the gym’s treadmill or bike.

You’ll have your own High Payoff ideas rather than wait for mine.

All too often our progress in business plateaus. You know, it levels off at the point you achieved when you last gave it attention. Very often we settle into ‘habit’ mode and forget to look at the long view for our business.

Over the years I’ve consulted to many business owners and leaders who want new results. By their own admission, they’ve assumed that staffing up or cutting expenses was the route to achieving their business’s next level. In their hearts they believed that if they managed the money, the rest would follow.

They’ve very often been wrong!

It’s already standard business practice to manage the money. What differentiates successful companies from those just noodling along are some things not discussed in business courses and business books.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: One of the most important ways to boost your business is to focus ON your obstacles.

Watch Your Competition

It’s very inspiring to be told to ignore your competition. We were well trained in school. all dream of doing better on a test than our classmates, and that carries over to how we behave in business. “I won’t look at yours paper if you don’t look at mine!”

The fact is, the more you know about your competition the quick you can sort through potential options for your own business, and sort out those that are relevant for you and those that are not.

Compare Yourself To Others

Some of the most stunning results my clients have made over the years have been by borrowing ideas that had nothing to do with their own industry or business. They kept an eye on the wide world of business through reading magazines, and talking with people in other industries. That allowed them to actually hear and see new ideas their direct competitors missed.

One example from a client I worked with in the legal support world will show you what I mean. They used to send out staff carrying 50 pound document copies that recorded the documents on film. That film was then turned into paper again and delivered to the attorneys who needed it. My client viewed that as the full cycle of their services. Period.

I noticed how often they got calls from past clients months later. An attorney wanted more copies of the documents… only no one knew where the film was in the law firm. My client was fed up with having to go back and get access again to re-shoot those documents. Taking an idea from the records management industry, my client began storing the film themselves, AND charging their grateful clients for the service.

Their attorney customers were delighted to get new copies the next day. And my client was pleased to have a new stream of revenue for nearly no additional work and miniscule amounts of storage space in a simple file drawer system.

Tighten Your Standards

We’ve all heard the principle of “80-20”. It’s been tracked and proven over and over again, 20 percent of your time produces the most important 80 percent of your results. (What ARE we doing with all that other time and effort, I’d like to know?)

80 percent of revenue comes from 20 percent of your clients. 80 percent of your aggravation comes from… you guessed it, 20 percent of your customers.

Even more important than measuring to see if it’s true in your business (you’ll see, it is) is WHAT you’ll do with the information. Will you sit down and calculate the lost productivity, the lost time and energy and intelligence of your team and yourself? Will you fire those distracting clients so that you can create the space to tip the scales into the profit zone rather than the distraction zone?

In the past two years I’ve concluded my work with 2 high profile and very demanding clients. I felt a deep tug of war because they were very lucrative clients. yet with each of them, I spent more time talking about the frustration of working with them, than on the work itself.

I released them to find other support, and in the next year I grew my own business by 40 percent.

The management books will tell you all about measuring the internal productivity of your ongoing operations. Their 80-20 rule will tell you to keep looking at the costs of your people.

If you want to outpace your competition, you need to shift your attention to what you can add OR subtract from your business to boost your own success.

If it’s been a while since you reviewed your Vision, and the action plans you’ve been following, you may have begun pursuing projects that feel like ‘shoulds’ rather than ones that have a direct, high payoff for achieving your Vision.

And if you’re keeping yourself over-worked and over-whelmed, you’re not building in time to notice that you’re putting energy into activities taking you further and further off-course.

So take a look at the most recent Vision and Objectives you set. And take a look at what you’ve got scheduled on your calendar. Ask yourself:

“What percentage of the activities I’m focusing on actually align with my Objectives?”

Make a 2-columned list – place the activities that are on track on the left and the ones that are off-track on the right.

Now create an action plan to wrap up the activities in the right-hand column in the next 10 business days. When you commit your attention fully to the actions that are aligned with your Vision, your results will be achieved much more rapidly than you ever anticipated!

Let me know the results you create!

This past week I spotted a trend among my clients. You might call it the ‘dash’… everyone is sprinting to prove they’re making changes in their business’s productivity as if that is a badge to earn all by itself.

And too often they are speeding down a track that is taking them to actions and solutions that will cost a lot of time and money and not even solve the issue at hand.

You may be caught in the same sense of urgency, starting an unnecessary race. So I thought I’d share the steps I use with my clients to get them focused at the right pace so that they get the full result they’re hoping for to grow their business.

Step 1 – Define The True Issue

One of my largest clients asked me to sit in during the first presentation by a tech team to address improving the Customer Services function at their company. Sure enough, the team ‘presented’ the issue by quoting back 35 interviewees’ concerns and then went straight into the proposed solution. Fortunately the COO paused the conversation and identified that he hadn’t heard the actual ‘need’ for which the proposed project was a solution.

Make sure you’ve defined exactly what is being ‘fixed’ and be sure the users of the solution are at the table defining what is needed.

Step 2 – Research the Options for Solutions

We all fall in love with our area of expertise. And the tech team members showed it clearly. They were proposing ‘web based’ technology and mega databases to gather all the interactions with clients… and they completely neglected the more familiar automated phone options and even email exchanges. Not to mention the non-tech solutions that could be created by realigning customer service personnel roles.

Take the time to flush out at least three options and run those ideas past the potential users to see if you’re staying on track.

Step 3 – Check that the Solution Matches Your Business Model

For this particular client, the end user will never be the person contacting Customer Service. Their distributors are the ones who will report issues and 20% of them are not computer users. That doesn’t mean they might not find technology solutions useful, but it won’t be sitting at their desk. They need solutions they can use when they are standing on site at a client, or get a phone call while driving between appointments.

All the technology in the world won’t solve your key challenge: make it easy for your customers to communicate with you the way they are ready to today. OR make it even easier!

Step 4 – Double Check That The Solution Works ‘Inside’ AND ‘Outside’

Not only does my client need to make it easy for their customers to be heard and responded to… They also need to capture the information so they can check internally to identify trends in their products and services and decide what may need to be redesigned. The tech team will need to design a system for gathering information easily, and passing it to those who need to know immediately, and summarizing it in reports for periodic trends analysis. At each stage, the information may look very different to each audience.

Sort out how you’ll store information over time so that you can be sure it serves improving your customer’s experience AND your own organization’s performance.

Step 5 – Design How You’ll Test And Adjust The Solution

Just like a rubber band springing back into place, changes in systems and people’s behavior can melt away when you assume it will all come together as needed. Nothing takes you off track more predictably than designing and instituting changes and then walking away from the project. Never assume the ‘design’ is the solution.

Before you invest time and money in permanently changing processes, and policies, and roles and responsibilities test the proposed system with all the users.

Commit to the project’s long-term success by assigning responsibility for testing your chosen solution and evaluating how it’s working… AND commit to adapting it as you learn what is working well and what needs to be tweaked.

Step 6 – Test And Adjust, Test And Adjust

My client is bringing together a task force of six disciplines to talk through all of the steps above. They’ll be guiding the tech team’s focus to be sure it meets all the users needs and stays on track with the Issue identified back in Step 1.

Now it’s your turn on the track.