September 25, 2008 - Do You Have the Passion?

Main Idea

When was the last time you went into a business and you felt the buzz in the building?  Were people happy and genuinely looking to serve you?  Or have you received a telemarketing call from someone who obviously was just going through the motions?  What is it like for someone to call your office?  Do they wade through the voice mail jungle and then when they get a live person the person barely acknowledges them?

Expansion of Idea

We have all been in businesses where it felt like someone died, the body was decomposing and they were ready for an autopsy.  If you worked there you knew you wanted to be somewhere else.  There is no possibility of providing outstanding customer service. 

One of the real keys to building a thriving organization is the passion of the leader.  The leader has to be passionate about the business, organization or cause.  The passion can’t be about himself or herself.  You know when you see a business that has this passion.  The leader is involved.  He is committed.  She sacrificed to make sure things work.  He goes the extra step for his employees.   

Passion does not have to be “in your face” emotion.  It can be the quiet strength of someone who is going to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.  Sometimes, it is just a matter of smiling and forcing yourself to do the job.  You may just reacquire the passion and love of your job that you have lost.

Suggested Areas to Start

1. Do you enjoy going to work?

2. Do your employees enjoy going to work?

3. If the answer is no to either of those questions, start asking questions?  Why or why not?  What can we change?

4. Consider taking some time off or taking a period of time to just think about the business and recharge your batteries.

September 18, 2008 - Failure is a Necessity

Main Idea

What is your view of someone who has declared bankruptcy?  Or someone who has flunked a test?  Have you tried selling a great idea to one person and then another and then another and no one wants to buy?  How many sports teams go into a prevent defense when they are winning and go on to lose because they are afraid to take any risks?  On the other hand, do you know people who never fail because they are safe in their own world?

Expansion of Idea

I heard a speaker recently comment that failure is a necessity.  This guy has built a large multi-site church and is tremendously successful.  I thought the comments were a little odd.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I agreed.  I thought about my own public speaking which does not come naturally to me.  In the sixth grade my parents pushed me to join the speech club.  I was reluctant but I memorized the speech and went to the meet.  Suffice it to say, I had a bad experience. 

That stuck with me until about 8 years ago.  I was making some changes in my accounting practice and had an opportunity to do a seminar that I really thought would help clients.  Suffice it to say that I was terrified of doing the seminar.  Yet I was excited because I knew I needed to do it and it provided some great business opportunities.  Because of the failure when I was 11, which I will not forgive my parents for, I knew I needed to really prepare for the seminar.  The seminar was a turn key program that did not need a lot of preparation.  I prepared anyway.  I focused on areas that I was passionate about.  The failure drove my actions in a way to ensure that the future public speaking was successful.  This is an area that I will always have to work on, but I know how to overcome those limitations and succeed. 

We are all afraid of failure but we should be more afraid of never trying anything new.  As Thomas Edison said after failing 10,000 times to invent the light bulb, “I did not fail, I just learned 10,000 ways not to design the light bulb.”

Suggested Areas to Start

1. List a few failures in your business or life

2. Make a note about what you learned

3. List one thing that you are currently afraid to do but you know you should do

4. Discuss this with your boss, coworker, spouse or other adviser and determine how to approach the problem

August 22, 2008 - Is Coaching Part of Your Culture?

Main Idea

Have you been watching the Olympics?  Do you wonder why certain athletes rise to the top?  What is the difference between those athletes that make it to the Olympics and those who just dream about it?  How often do you hear about not just the athlete but also their coach?  Is the coach critical to excellence? 

Expansion of Idea

Coaches are an integral part of all high performing teams.  Between 1964 and 1975, UCLA won 10 national championships in basketball.  This is the best extended performance in college basketball and probably in all sports ever.  I can’t imagine that this record will ever be broken.  Why?  The key is a humble man named John Wooden.  In my opinion, he is the greatest coach ever.  The number one thing that I focus on when I think about John Wooden is that he rarely called timeouts during the game to discuss strategy or execution with his team.  They were ready before the game and he trusted them to do the right things.  His teams were prepared and as a result they won. 

We do not fully realize the impact that coaching in all aspects of our lives can have.  This is as true for businesses as it is for elite sports teams.  If you want to perform at your highest level, do you have a coach?  What about your team?  Have you been coaching them?  Or do you practice mental telepathy?  How is that working for you?

Suggested Areas to Start

1. Read a book about John Wooden. (A great book outlining his philosophy is “Be Quick But Don’t Hurry“)

2. Evaluate the culture in your business.  Is coaching part of the culture?

3. Develop a coaching plan for the people that report to you.

4. Evaluate your performance and decide if you need a coach. 

5. Find someone to hold you accountable for following through.

August 15, 2008 - Are You Constantly Working on Improving Your Business?

Main Idea

Do you have ideas for improvement?  How dusty are they in your brain or on your desk?  Or are they so buried on your desk that it would take six months to rescue them?  Are you stuck in a rut and just can’t get enough energy to change ruts?  Ideas are worthless unless you act on them.  

Expansion of Idea

Best quoted by the late Christian author, Vance Havner, "The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps – we must step up the stairs." At best, an idea is a launching pad - a take off point, the bottom of the stairs.  Most of us know how to improve our companies.  The problem is that we are afraid to do what we know we should do.  We think that we can incrementally improve the services.  On the other end, we don’t change anything until we get it absolutely perfect.  We just don’t want to change anything because we are comfortable. 

All of these approaches end up with us continuing to do the same thing over and over and then we wonder why our businesses go into a slow and steady decline.  A banker called me yesterday and asked if I could help one of his clients with a business workout.  The company had been in business for a long time and now is selling or liquidating.  There isn’t much to do when it is in that stage.  The time to act is when the business is going well or at a minimum when you still have resources to make changes. 

These weekly business ideas were in my brain for almost a year.  I knew that I needed to get started because I thought they may be able to help clients.  I would never know unless I tried them. 

Areas to Start

1. Make a list of things that you think will help your business

2. Plan for the implementation. (Include your team!!!!)

3. As Nike says “Just Do It”

July 25, 2008 - Do You Understand Your Business Environment?

Main Idea

Does the idea of strategic planning scare you?  Do you have to be able to see into the future?  Is it even necessary?  When was the last time you took some time to adequately plan for the future for your business?  When was the last time you planned for your family?  Do you know your partner’s goals?  What about your spouse or your team member’s goals?    

Expansion of Idea

My son, Mark, was able to go surfing this year and explained to me the whole concept of riptides.  This was not something that I had thought a lot about since they don’t generally occur in Ellisville Missouri.  Basically, they can be very beneficial if you find the riptide and ride the riptide out with your surfboard.  But many people drown in riptides because they try to swim into the face of the riptide instead of swimming parallel and getting out of the flow.  This is just a matter of planning and understanding the environment that you are in. 

The business world is the same.  Strategic planning is often viewed as worrying about the future.  In a few isolated instances with technology, that is correct.  However, for most of us strategic planning is understanding the world as it exists today.  Your business for the next five years is to a large extent already determined by inventions, patterns and world climate as it currently exists.  But most of us do not take the time to adequately assess our businesses, our lives and the world to put a plan in place that will help us not only survive but thrive in the future.  We are just trying to get back to the shoreline and safety. 

Area to Start

1. Talk to the key people in your business and your lives

2. Assess your business and personal goals

3. Ask yourself the key questions, “Do you have a good direction of where you are going and are you on track to get there?”

July 11, 2008 - What is Your Strategy?

Main Idea

Last week we celebrated the Fourth of July, which was the 232nd anniversary of our independence. That holiday is very relevant for most small business owners because they went into business looking for freedom. However, most small business owners aren’t free because they are held captive by their business because of either a lack of strategy, a lack of clarity about their strategy, or a lack of execution.

Expansion of Idea

How do we gain freedom? We need to be crystal clear about what our strategy is. Only then can our team can help us get to our destination. Do you know what your strategy is? If you aren’t clear, then you need to work on your clarity. One simple way is to start defining what you are not and then actually start a “Not To Do” list. After you do this for awhile you will start getting closer to your true strategy.

Several years ago, I eliminated almost all of the personal tax returns for clients who live in other states. Some of which had been with my firm for over 15 years. This was a hard decision, but I didn’t add as much value to those returns. They were unlikely to start businesses that we could work with and used very valuable time during tax season that I could spend more productively with my business clients.

There were some important lessons for my team as a result of this. They realized that we needed to spend more time with these business clients to help them achieve their goals. Taking this step also helped the team see that I was serious about doing more for the small business clients, allowing them to concentrate on a more narrow focus and not have to worry about 25 different states. Deciding what you are not going to do will free up valuable time and resources. 

Areas to Look At

1. Systems

2. Customer Selection

3. How you and your team spend time

4. Customer Profitability

5. Product Profitability

6. Employee Profitability