An End-of-Year Leadership Check Up: Get Your Business Back on Track

Allen E. Fishman, Founder and Chairman of The Alternative Board

Anyone can be an entrepreneur, but not everyone can be an entrepreneur while also being a great leader. The biggest test to see whether you are a successful leader within your company is to take a look directly into the success of your company. Hint: The success of your company is a direct reflection upon your leadership skills—good or bad.

The characteristics of a great leader are endless, from being caring, kind and empathetic to detail-oriented, driven and ambitious. You’ll find all leaders have common characteristics that set them apart from others, but none are totally unique. Simply put, most people have the characteristics of becoming a great leader; it’s how they use them that will be the deciding factor.

Are you an effective leader within your company? Want to find out? The questions below have “yes” or “no” answers. What are your answers?

• Is your company where you would like it to be when you first started the company, or is it at least moving in the right direction?
• Do you have good relationships with your employees?
• Do you feel confident knowing that you don’t need to monitor every move your management team makes?
• If you had the opportunity and time to give your company an internal make-over (i.e. hire stronger/more motivated employees, re-write your company mission and vision statements, etc.), would you decide against it?  

If you answered “no” to most of these questions, then you probably are not doing your job as being a great leader to your employees. Don’t feel bad, this is not uncommon. Luckily, you are on the road to becoming a better leader.

Most business owners have at least heard of strategic planning, and some might even think they are leading their businesses strategically. However, entrepreneurs, as well as small and medium-sized companies, have unique needs when it comes to strategic planning—needs that traditional strategic planning overlook.

Let’s compare strategic planning for entrepreneurial organizations to a bike. Imagine that the front wheel represents your personal life, goals, etc. and the back wheel represents your company goals, vision, etc. In short, the front wheel steers and the rear wheel gives power. Just like a bike, your company and life cannot move forward if one of them isn’t working.

I break down a strategicplanning process into the following steps. Each step has questions designed to make you think hard about your personal and business goals.

Step 1: Your Personal Vision and Your Company Vision

Step 2: A Look in the Mirror

Step 3: Your Personal Plans and The Business Plan

Step 4: Making it Happen

Step 5: Turning the Wheel

By going through each step two different times—once for your personal path (front wheel) and once for your company path (rear wheel)—you will learn how to better improve your company by learning to lead your company in the right direction.

Like most plans go, strategic planning for your company is not as easy as it looks, but it’s not extremely difficult either. Strategic planning does take time and careful consideration. Also, keep in mind that how you plan for your company at first might change in a year or two, so be sure to revisit your strategic plan on a yearly basis making any changes needed in order to grow and maintain your status as a leader.

You always hear people refer to the common saying, “They are a natural-born leader.” That is not always true for most people, but by learning how to be a leader and using those skills, you’ll see that the “sky’s the limit” on where your leadership skills can take you.

Allen E. Fishman founded The Alternative Board® (TAB), the world’s largest franchise system providing advisory board and executive coaching services to business owners, Presidents and CEOs. TAB’s worldwide business advisory network operates in over 1,000 cities in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Venezuela.

Fishman is also the author of several books in which he shares his business insights to help business owners, including two best-sellers: 7 Secrets of GreatEntrepreneurial Master: The GEM Power Formula for Lifelong Success (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and 9 Elements of FamilyBusiness Success: A Proven Formula for Improving Leadership & Relationshipsin Family Business (McGraw-Hill 2008).

Translating Social Networking into Real Benefits for Your Business

Jacquelyn Gernaey, TAB Certified Facilitator/Coach

To social network or not, that is the question.  We are not talking about the social networking your kids or grandkids might do, we are talking about making social networking an integrated part of you marketing plan. (You all have marketing plans, right?)

Ok, so for those who might not yet know what social networking is all about, think of it like regular networking in that you meet people, you join groups, you have conversations, you make and get referrals, you focus on giving rather than getting, and you benefit in the long run by helping others and by being an expert.

You are thinking, "if I take the time to do it, how does it benefit my business?"  The first and most important thing social networking does is to build a deeper engagement with your customers.  They are online already and talking about you or your competitors, voicing opinions and posting comments.  Knowing what they are saying allows you to react and resolve issues, and to learn what they might like for future products or services.

 

Doing this online is far easier and cheaper than using comment cards or focus groups.

This is the minimum social networking every company should do.  It requires monitoring posting sites, providing your customers with a forum for comment and ensuring your customer service policies empower your employees to resolve issues before they end up posted online.

If you want to use social networking to generate new business, it can help improve how people view your brand.  It allows for unbiased references, which is especially important if you are in a service business (many sties allow you to review comments before they are posted). The 80/20 rule applies here. Focus on giving advice on a subject of your customers' interest, thereby setting yourself up as an expert. Giving advice or help 80% of the time gives you the right to sell 20% of the time by inviting potential clients to seminars or giving them coupons to buy.

Social networking can also help if you need to hire employees.  You can tell people in your groups your needs, post ads on networking sites and research potential hires to get an insight into the real person before you hire

Getting a referral for a new vendor becomes a snap with social networking.  Post your needs in a discussion forum or community. When you get a recommendation, read their reviews to help you make a decision.

There are 1000’s of social networking possibilities such as blogs (wordpress), sharing pictures of projects (flicker), and training videos (YouTube).  It all begins with the conversation.  When you put social networking in your plan, think long-term.  The right choice for you is based on your goals, your manpower, and budget.  Like any networking or other marketing tactic, make sure you calculate your return-on-investment.  For advice on attracting more traffic to your Facebook page, visit this article from Entrepreneur magazine written by Mikel Belicove. As you begin, don’t forget all your company’s existing written, multi-media, and connection capital that you can exploit.  Start small but do start!

Jacquelyn Gernaey, bestselling author of a business book with giants Brian Tracy, Mark Victor Hansen, et al, endorsed by Dr. Stephen R. Covey and Ken Blanchard entitled Create the Business Breakthrough You Want, is President and founder of HyTech Consulting, a management consulting firm based on Long Island, NY and founded in 1994 and Chief Executive of The Alternative Board, Suffolk County. 

She has more than thirty years experience leading both entrepreneurial and large corporations and now focuses helping CEOs, presidents, owners and partners create, execute and exceed their personal and business success goals. This is accomplished through sales, marketing and management consulting, pre and post employment talent management assessments, executive coaching and facilitating peer boards of business owners.

Why Unsubscribes Can Be A Good Thing

From Lyris: White Papers; The Role of DNS, Unsubscribes, and Bounces in Email Deliverability 

Can unsubscribes be good? No sender ever wants to lose an address of course, but when one turns bad or a recipient asks to stop receiving mail, it can actually be a blessing in disguise.

Why? Because spammers work hard to make their mail look as legitimate as possible—in other words, to make it look like your mail. So aside from what you send, recipients and ISPs also recognize you as a good sender by how you behave. A clear, easy, and effective unsubscribe process is the perfect opportunity to distinguish yourself as one of the good guys, and this can really help if blockages or other delivery problems should arise.

Here are three more reasons to smile as you’re removing email addresses from your list:

1.) Unsubscribe requests keep your list vital and responsive

One of the strongest tenets of the federal CAN-SPAM law www.lyris.com/resources/antispam/canspam_faq.html) requires senders to honor all unsubscribe requests within ten days, and the Federal Trade Commission has proposed that the number of days be reduced to three. Rather than view this new development as a stricture, however, consider that this requirement is actually likely to work in favor of most marketing goals. By processing unsubscribe requests quickly, lists are kept populated with recipients who actually want to receive your mail—and traditional direct marketing wisdom tells us that such recipients tend to be the most interested and responsive to offers and other messages.

So, while there’s no doubt the sending environment is becoming more regulated, the legitimate email marketer should greet unsubscribe requests gladly and view them just as a gardener does pruning: as an opportunity to keep your list well-formed and fruitful.

2.) Removing bad addresses has long-term deliverability benefits

Some marketers have a hard time saying goodbye to bad addresses, rationalizing that there’s no harm in trying to send to truly undeliverable addresses if there’s a chance of getting through. But this strategy can actually do a great deal of harm to your overall deliverability. ISPs quickly lose patience with senders who repeatedly send to inactive addresses since processing erroneous mail uses their resources. In addition, sending to a high percentage of “dead” addresses can be interpreted by the ISP as an indication that your list may have been harvested and that you—the sender—are a spammer. So if an address bounces twice, sacrifice it to the cause of greater deliverability and overall ISP relations. Set your software or service to remove it automatically after a couple of failures—and don’t look back.

3.)Unsubscribes are infinitely preferable to the other way recipients can ask to stop receiving your mail

When recipients ask you to remove them from your list, it means that they’re choosing to follow your unsubscribe process, instead of complaining to their ISP that your mail is spam. In this sense, unsubscribe requests are a sign from recipients that they trust you to honor their requests. If there’s no easy way for them to unsubscribe, or if past unsubscribe requests have been ignored or failed, they’re much more likely to hit the “this is spam” button. When a recipient unsubscribes from your list, remember that you’re simply losing a single email address. On the other hand, when enough recipients click the “this is spam” button, your mail could ultimately be blocked ISPs, or worse—you could be added to blacklists.

Applying the 80/20 Rule to Daily Tasks

by Blair Koch, TAB-Certified Facilitator/Coach, Denver, CO

One tried and true time management tool is the simple act of making a daily task list. As elementary as this sounds, list making helps busy people be more productive, experience less stress and frees them up to focus on business strategy. In observing entrepreneurs and business owners using lists in an effort to increase productivity, I’ve noticed two common problems they encounter. Applying the 80/20 rule – the theory that 20 percent of what you do generates 80 percent of the results – can solve both problems.

Problem #1: Putting too much on the list. My TAB members and executive clients are successful entrepreneurs. They’re full of ideas, energy and enthusiasm. As such, they often create daily task lists that are unrealistically long. I call this tendency "the curse of ambition". At the end of the day, instead of feeling pleased with what they’ve accomplished, they’re disappointed in themselves for not finishing everything. You don’t have to fall into this trap. When you make your list for tomorrow, think in terms of 80/20. Write your list as usual and next to each item jot down the approximate time each task will likely take, padding each estimate by 20%. Then reduce your list by 20% in terms of hours to be spent by prioritizing as outlined in Problem #2.

Problem #2: Failing to prioritize. Sometimes executives accomplish little or nothing from their lists because they spend too much time on “urgent” tasks instead of “important” tasks. As you review your list for the 20% that should drop off (because you know that some tasks will take longer than planned and unexpected issues requiring your attention will inevitably crop up), apply the 80/20 rule. Identify the 20% of tasks that have an 80% chance of improving your profitability. This may be something as simple as placing a phone call to a potential new client or spending an hour reviewing projections for next quarter. The goal is to make sure you’re spending your valuable time on tasks that will deliver bottom line results for your company. What about the items that need to be done but don’t fit these criteria? Delegate.

An effective daily list can increase your productivity by 20% or more. Use a list wisely, focus your time and energy on the 20% of tasks that will grow your business, and watch as your efforts trickle right down to the bottom line.

Blair Koch is the President of TAB – Denver West, has been on the front line, at the boardroom table and everywhere in between. Her experience includes business start-up, operations, development, sales and marketing, project and product management, strategic planning and facilitation. Visit Blair at www.TABdenverwest.com

Cash: A Common Sense Approach

When you work for a large corporation you don’t spend much time worrying about cash.  When I was a General Manager of a $100 Million Division for a large multi-national corporation that had over $1 billion in cash I never worried about where the money was coming from, I just spent it. When I started my own electronics company I ran out of cash within the first few months. I had to raise more money by selling more stock. After that time I didn’t run out of cash again for 14 years.

Some of the most successful companies in the world are those that grow at astounding rates. Sales soar, but so do costs in most cases and cash becomes the most important aspect of the business. Without available cash your company could be put on credit hold or cash-on-delivery for materials necessary to produce your product. You could also go bankrupt.  One of my good friends grew a company from nothing to over $50 Million in sales in three years, but he ran out of cash and had to file for bankruptcy

One of the most important rules in business is to be able to meet the cash demands of your payroll. That should be your number one priority. If you miss payroll one time its not long before your employees are looking for another job in a company that can meet their cash needs. There were times when my partner and I waited a few days before we cashed our paychecks just to make sure we had enough money in the bank to pay all of our employees first.

How do you prevent running out of money?

1.      Establish a line of credit with your bank long before you need it. Banks are eager to serve your needs when you have cash in the bank and you are successful.

2.      Establish close relationships with your customer’s payables managers. I always took them to lunch at least every quarter so when I called they didn’t know if I was asking them to pay me or if I was calling to take them to lunch. When we did go to lunch I always got a check from them.

3.      Talk to your customers about early payment. My company was one of the smallest doing business, but we gave them excellent service and we were thought to be one of their top suppliers. My largest customer paid me in 15 days. Be careful about offering discounts for early payment because some will take the discount and still not pay you for 60 days.

4.      Know how much cash you are going to collect each week before you make out your checks to your suppliers. Project your cash requirements for at least 3 months in advance. Call your customers to find out if you will be getting a check from them when it is due. I met with my controller at least twice a week to see what checks we had received and if there were any problem payers. I had my controller set up a running cash analysis that looked like a household budget.

5.      If you see that you are going to run out of cash in advance (remember it was 14 years later that it happened to my company) call your best customer and see if you can borrow the money from them. I had run out of cash because my best customer had not needed my service for 2 months, which was most unusual, so I did not have the receivables to collect from them. I called one of their board members and told him the situation. He told me to fly down with my cash flow plan and meet with him. I had a check for $100,000 in 2 days and had to pay back the note over a one year period of time starting in 6 months with no interest. All he wanted was a 1% discount on all products that his company purchased until the note was repaid.

Having enough cash is probably the most important aspect of a small business. Knowing how to get it is mainly common sense.