10 New Year's Business Resolutions

If you are a small business owner and thinking about what you are going to resolve to do in the new year (besides that personal resolution of losing weight... for the 4th year in a row!), here are a few ideas for you.  Please don't resolve to do the whole list, just pick one or two, and if you complete them you can always add others.

1. Prepare a Strategic Plan.  If you have a team of employees, include some or all of them and take at least a half-day to lay out a good Strategic Plan for your business.  You and your team will be energized by it, you'll come away with priorities to work on and your team will be more aligned with the direction you'd like the business to move.
2. Communicate Employee Expectations.  One simple way to do this is to prepare Position Descriptions for each position and then sit down with each employee and discuss what you expect of them.  Give them a chance for input and clarification so that they'll have a sense of ownership of their position.  Often employees feel that they would be happy to do whatever the boss wants.... if he/she would only tell them!
3. Improve Your Financial Statement Understanding.  Admit it.  You don't look at your financial statements very much, do you?  If these critical numbers don't make much sense to you, let this be the year you seek some guidance on how to utilize these tools to make your business more successful.
4. Add One Element to your Marketing Plan.  Most of us don't utilize as many marketing tactics as we should in promoting our businesses.  And new marketing approaches seem to be created every day.  Find one (or two) good ones, and implement them to improve your lead generation.
5. Delegate More.  If you are so critical that your business can't run without you and if you complain that you don't have the time you'd like to enjoy life a little more, how about finding Low-Value, Low-Fun tasks that you do and offload them to someone else?  Make this the year that you graduate to running your business rather than it running you.
6. Measure More Stuff.  Otherwise known as Key Performance Indicators, there are things in your business that mean a lot to your success.  Find a way to measure them and report them frequently, and they will magically focus your entire team on things that they can do to improve results.
7. Re-Think Your Unique Selling Proposition.  If you don't know what this USP is, think of it as a summary of your key marketing messages.  What are you saying about your business that compels customers to do business with you instead of your competitors?  If you have an USP, it might be time to re-think it because target customers and how they think can change over time.  If you don't have an USP, well, you know....
8. Raise Price.  When was the last time you had a price increase?  If more than a year ago, you need to seriously consider an upward adjustment again.  Your costs aren't going down are they?  Unless you are in a commodity business and happy about it, you need to sell value and price it for what it's worth.
9. Offer Something More.  If your product or service hasn't changed in the last five years, you may be losing ground.  What new products or services could you offer?  What enhancements or value-adders would attract new customers?  Our world is changing fast and customers are getting used to wanting something new more frequently (think smart phones!).
10. Take A Break.  When was the last time you took a vacation?  What is the thing you keep promising your spouse or family that you will do (once the business hits a certain plateau which never seems to arrive)?  Find a way this year to do something for yourself to recharge your batteries and give just a little attention to the rest of your life, your non-business life.  Remember that one?

If some or all of these resolution ideas seem too difficult, perhaps a coach is what you need.  After all, if you seriously wanted to lose weight, you would consider a personal trainer.  How much more serious is it to you to have a successful business?  Happy New Year!

Fitting It All In

How are you doing with getting all the things done that you'd like (or need) to do?  If you're a business owner, do you feel you have a balance between work and personal life?  Is your business supporting your life or is your life spent serving your business?  If you can answer these questions positively, good for you!  My guess is that you are an expert at managing your time.

If you feel less in control of your time, maybe taking a step back and looking at how you use time would help.  Consider first of all those people you know who seem to get a lot done.  They manage their business, spend time with family, participate in community organizations, enjoy recreational pursuits, and even kick back and relax once in awhile!  How in the world do they do it?

Well first of all, we all get the same amount of time to spend.  No silver spoons exist when it comes to time.  So the only thing that is unique is how each of us uses time.  And I'd like to suggest that efficient use of your time comes down to essentially two things:  Discipline and Priority.

Let's think about Priority first.  There are so many distractions coming at us every day, that without some type of screening mechanism, they can rule our life, taking away the conscious actions we want to take.  It's easy to get caught up in a TV program, or a social media site, or even the latest gossip from friends.  In our business it might be email and paperwork.  But are those our priorities?  Usually, when we stop to think about what we want in our lives, these don't make the list.  Instead we typically yearn for time with family, building a stronger business and team, travel, education, even a modest amount of wealth.  It takes effort to achieve these dreams, so shouldn't these efforts be our priority?  The people we admire who have these things have the ability to spend their time where their priorities are.

Second is Discipline.  It takes a certain resolve and focus to be able to turn off the TV or step away from the computer or the gossip.  If we are in touch with our gift of free choice, we realize that we are in control of our choices and have no one to blame but ourselves for what we do with our time.  Discipline gives us the ability to be true to what we believe and to maintain our efforts in support of our dreams.  It also provides the focus to stay persistent when the work gets hard or uncomfortable and we get pulled toward the easy and the familiar (but away from our goals).

Often, time management comes down to our habits.  Habits can get us through life with ease, or they can lead us toward disaster.  For example, if you have the habit of exercise, you don't think much about it, but you become so used to the good feeling that exercise provides that you miss it when you don't exercise.  On the other hand, lack of exercise is also a habit, but one that could lead to poor health and shortened life span.  The habits in our life also take time.  So if your habits are using up your time without leading you toward your goals, as comfortable as those habits have become, you have to find the discipline to change them.  I guarantee this will be hard!  You'll screw it up from time to time.  It will be uncomfortable.  But unless you change, you'll continue to lose time to do the things you want most.

Hidden Goal of the Smartest Business Owners

What are your business goals for the year? If you’re like most owners, you have a profit goal you want to hit. You may also have a top line revenue number that’s important to you. While those goals are important, there is another objective that may have an even bigger payoff: building a sellable business. How has that entered into your planning for 2014?

But what if you don’t want to sell? That’s irrelevant. Here are five reasons why building a sellable business should be your most important goal, regardless of when you plan to push the eject button:

1. Sellability means freedom - One of the fundamental tenants of sellability is how well your company would perform if you were unable to work for a while. As long as your business is dependent on you personally, there’s not much to sell. Making your company less dependent on you by building a management team and creating just-add-water systems for employees to follow means you have the ability to spend time away from your business. Think of the world of possibilities that would open up if you could choose not to go into the office tomorrow….

2. Sellable businesses are more fun - Running a business would be fun if you were able to spend your days on strategic thinking and big picture ideas. Instead, most business owners spend the majority of their day on the minutia: the government forms, the employee performance reviews, email, customer issues. The boring details of company ownership suck the enjoyment out of owning a business—and it is exactly these tasks you need to get into someone else’s job description if you’re ever going to sell.

3. Sellability is financial freedom - Each month you open your brokerage statement to see how your portfolio is doing. Not because you want to sell your portfolio, but because you want to know where you stand on the journey to financial freedom. Creating a sellable business also allows you peace of mind, knowing that you’re building something that—just like your stock portfolio—has value you could choose to make liquid one day.

4. Sellability is a gift - Imagine that your first-born graduates from college and as a gift you give him your prized 1967 Shelby Ford Mustang. Your heavily indebted child takes it on the road, but after a few miles, the engine starts smoking. The mechanic takes one look under the hood and declares that the engine needs a rebuild. You thought you were giving your child an incredible asset, but instead it’s an expensive liability he can’t afford to keep, and nor can he sell it without feeling guilty.

You may be planning to pass your business on to your kids or let your young managers buy into your company over time. These are both admirable exit options, but if your business is too dependent on you, and it hasn’t been tuned up to run without you, you may be passing along a jalopy.

5. Nine women can’t make a baby in one month - There are some things in life that take time, no matter how much you want to rush them. Making your business sellable often requires significant changes; and a prospective buyer is going to want to see how your business has performed for the three years after you have made the changes required to make your business sellable. Therefore, if you want to sell in five years, you need to start making your business sellable now so the changes have time to gestate.

Followup

One of the easiest, free, almost 100% guaranteed to work methods of increasing your sales volume is usually right in front of us.  Yet most small business owners and managers fail to take advantage of this "too obvious" way to improve business.  As the title of this post indicates, it's Followup.

I'm not sure what it is about Followup that keeps us from using this effective sales and marketing tactic.  Maybe it just seems too easy.  But what I do know from my experiences with small business owners is that it seldom gets used as well as it should.

Here's a typical conversation:
Me: "Tell me about the kind of prospects or pending sales you have in your pipeline."
Biz Owner: "Well, we actually have a lot of pending business. Our marketing efforts seem to keep our pipeline quite full. If we could just get more of them to close, life would be good."
Me: "That's great news that your marketing efforts are producing. Tell me about how you followup on the prospects you have."
Biz Owner: (Sheepishly) "Well actually we have very little time for followup. It's something we know we should do, but it always seems to get dropped."
Me: "Okay. What do you think your conversion rate is from prospect to customer? Usually in Followup mode it's higher than the conversion rate on "cold" prospects.  Based on the amount of prospects in your pipeline, how much business could you get in the next 30-60 days if you simply followed up with the prospects in your pipeline?"
Biz Owner: (Silence while doing the math. Then eyes getting wider, and voice getting higher...) "OMG!! We have got to start doing more followup right away!!"

Okay, maybe that's a little oversimplified.  But in my experience, when businesses go from doing no followup to being disciplined and consistent with followup, their sales usually increase (drum roll.....) 10 - 30%!!!  And when business owners do the simple math they generally do act quickly to enact more disciplined followup.

If you regularly quote or bid projects in your business, think about the number of projects you've bid where you've never heard from the customer.  What kind of impression have you left if you never checked with them to see if they had any questions about your bid?  How have you differentiated yourself from others who also don't followup?  Just think what would happen if you were the only bidder to actually call to ask how else you could help?  Doesn't that leave the impression that you might be more reliable and professional than the guy they never hear from?

I know, I know, you don't want to be perceived as "pushy" or a pest who just keeps calling.  But how are you perceived if they never hear from you?  Good professional followup is actually appreciated, not scorned.  Few people or businesses in our society followup, so those that do stand out and actually gain the perception that they are thorough and professional.

So your choice is clear:  Keep doing what you're doing and get the results you're getting.  Or followup to differentiate yourself from your competition and get maybe 10-30% more sales.

Followup, and let me know how it works out.

Back to Basics

It's hard not to get wrapped up in the complexities of what our businesses demand of us each and every day.  The sheer magnitude of "stuff" that happens during our day makes the business seem complicated.  Then when you throw in the unexpected, it can feel overwhelming.  An employee quits, a customer has a complaint, a shipment doesn't arrive or your main computer server has a meltdown.  You fall in bed at the end of a long day and get up in the morning and do it all over again.  Who said being an entrepreneur was empowering and exhilarating?

Recently, I conducted a seminar on marketing in which we discussed the easy-to-overlook need to think about what your target customer really looks like.  Of course that seems obvious, so much so that one of the attendees commented, "It sounds like we just have to get back to basics".  Actually that is precisely the answer to most small business challenges, including dealing with the complexities and magnitude of our daily challenges.

AdviCoach research breaks down typical business challenges into five basic categories, and in my coaching career, I find that one or more of these five areas nearly always serve to explain what is going wrong in a business.  So going back to basics by thinking about, and dealing with, each of these dangers can often set a business back on track.  And if the business owner can't quite seem to course-correct the challenges on their own, a competent business coach can help make the process more understandable and get the changes in place faster.

Here are the Five Business Dangers that you should consider as your "back to basics" template:

• Inefficient Marketing - You aren't getting the sales (or even the leads) that you need, but you haven't re-calibrated your marketing plan since the internet was invented.  How will prospects learn about you if your marketing messages never hit their intended target?
• Under-Performing Sales - Where do we learn to sell in this country?  It isn't from university business programs where it is nearly impossible to get a degree in Sales.  Rather it is usually from "tribal knowledge", or sales experiences that have provided hints as to how we are supposed to go about selling.  Since these are usually flawed, getting help to learn modern, collaborative selling techniques for ourselves and our sales team is a basic that must be addressed.
• Financial Mismanagement - If you aren't paying attention to the numbers, you might as well drive your car without a dashboard.  It's just not possible to consistently make good business decisions without some type of scoreboard of your results.  This is one of those basics that AT LEAST half of all small business owners need to improve upon.
• Lack of Human Capital Management - If you find yourself saying "I can't find good workers anymore" or "young people nowadays just don't have the work ethic we did" or similar blame-type comments, I have to politely suggest to you that the problem may actually be you.  For most small businesses today, the biggest expense we have is cost of labor, yet we spend little time nurturing our people, caring for their well-being, investing in their training and skills and in general helping them perform at their peak.
• Poor Leadership - This may be the grand-daddy of all the Five Dangers because the others seem to stem from it.  But in essence it shows up in a business owner who has no plan or vision of where the business is going and fails to embrace the kind of systems that could help keep it on track.  Business owners who do the technical work of the business fall prey to poor leadership because as the business grows they fail to change how they work, missing opportunities to put other people and systems in place to permit real growth in profits and equity value.

When things aren't going as well as you'd like, or if you are simply looking for new ideas and strategies to bring your business to the proverbial "next level", perhaps a coach can provide some fresh perspective by helping you discover the basics you may be missing.

Why Hire A Business Coach?

Modestly successful is how I'd describe my high school athletic career.  Honorable mention all-conference linebacker, conference champion in track and field, played two years of basketball, but not quite good enough to play on Friday and Saturday nights.  You get the picture.  There are probably a number of you out there with similar experiences and memories.

I guess I had some natural talent.  I was strong enough.  I grew up in Wisconsin farm country, slinging hay bales on my uncle's farm in the summer.  I was fast, but not the fastest, nor did I have tremendous endurance.  I had my sports heroes, and tried to watch and learn from them.  But I had one thing that made the difference between no memories and nice memories of my high school sports days, and that was good coaching.

On warm August mornings, I can still hear my old football coach, Mr. Noonan, yelling "Pick up the pace, Baltus!"  "One more sprint!"  "That was terrible....Do it again!"  But just as important as that discipline and motivation was the ability of all my coaches to teach me the technique and the strategies of the game.

In business, the similarities are striking.  We all have some ability and experience.  We bring some talent into our business.  We can watch others, talk to others and read about others who have done good things in business.  And just as in our high school sports days, we can improve with the help of a coach to enhance our discipline, motivation, technique and strategy.

Let's take a look at some of the reasons that coaching is becoming more important to business performance enhancement:

• A coach is a mentor or confidant.  When you are the owner or leader of a business, who do you confide in?  The old adage is true; "It's lonely at the top."  A coach can and should be a sounding board, a listener, someone to play back to you what he/she thought you said so you can hear it for yourself.
• Accountability.  My high school coach made sure I ran 100 yard sprints at the end of practice.  It would have been tempting to slack off without his attention.  Many business owners have good plans and good intentions, but fail to execute simply because other distractions get in the way of completing the most important things they intend to do.  A business coach holds the leader accountable to their own goals.
• Vision.  It's easy to forget "that vision thing", as George H. W. Bush called it.  We all get mired in the details of the day and fail to step back and remind ourselves where we wanted to go in the first place.  A coach focuses on the vision or the goal first, and then helps us develop the actions necessary to reach those goals.
• Objective feedback.  Ever tried to tell your spouse, or your brother or best friend some of your dreams or fears.  The feedback isn't usually too objective, is it?  A coach can take the emotions out of your fears and dreams and help you see them for what they are.
• Source of ideas.  Sometimes you just get stuck.  The answers aren't obvious.  You haven't been trained for "this", whatever "this" is.  How do your grow?  How do you handle a sensitive employee issue?  How can you cut back on working so doggone many hours?  A coach has generally seen other options and is aware of other possibilities that you just haven't been exposed to.  Why not take advantage of that experience?
• Coaching pays.  Any good coach wants to help you make more money than you are going to invest in the coaching to help you do it.  But here's the tricky part... it only works if you are engaged and committed to the process.  Here's where the sports analogy comes into play again.  The coach can only show you the exercises, teach you the game and motivate you.  But you have to do the work and compete and play the game.  When that happens you and your coach win!

There's deep satisfaction that comes with success.  Doesn't it make sense to do everything possible to help make success more likely?