Wayne Wilson on Companies in Transition

Spinning up the fly wheel

I am currently involved in a new business development project – you know the kind: Constant wheel spinning trying to get traction while at the same time sucking all of the oxygen out of your life.

And there are good days and bad days. Good days when you feel euphoric and bad days when you just want to stick your head under a faucet. This week has finally seen two good days in a row where pitch meetings with potential partners went very well. (They will sign up officially, won’t they?) I can feel the wheels occasionally grabbing hold a bit even if they are still spinning a lot.

And then you have one of those kindred spirit encounters that really put a glow on the end of a long week. I had one of those yesterday.

A brief chance meeting turned into a quick lunch and three hours later we were still sitting at the window table of this little café delving into the who, what, how, and when of a significant potential business initiative tangentially related to the biz dev project.

The new initiative may or may not click, and it may or may not leverage the biz dev project, but it was one of those exhilarating intellectual moments when you feel yourself connecting with someone, whom you have previously known only casually, on multiple levels at the same time with ideas flowing rapidly between you as the energy and excitement about the prospects build.

Now if I good just gen up a day like that every week or so…

The day goes as the day begins

On days without early scheduled commitments, I have noticed that the day goes as the day begins. A feverish early commitment to a priority project usually results in a very productive day, while more leisurely early time spent with the morning’s papers and news sites frequently becomes one of those, “what did I do today?” days.

What gives? The same hours (excluding the newspaper time) may have been committed to work on both days, but the intensity clearly differs. Start strong; finish strong. Start slow; well, you know….

Business owners, free-lancers, and independent professionals all have the same problem: How do you hold yourself accountable for performance without someone constantly looking over your shoulder?

Here is my formula:

1. Focus – Be very thoughtful and clear in your own mind about what you are trying to accomplish. Write it down if that helps, but be very clear.
2. Prioritize – Some tasks simply matter more than others. Concentrate your most important tasks during those hours of the day when you are personally most productive.
3. Commit – There is no shortcut; just put your head down and get going.
4. Decline – Don’t get distracted. Decline to participate in the daily time waster activities. (You know what they are.)
5. Deadline – If you aren’t facing a real deadline, create one. Nothing concentrates the mind like a deadline.

Do you love what you do?

Do you wake up in the morning excited to go to work? Do you look forward with eager anticipation to the day’s challenges and tasks? Do you become so engrossed in your work that you lose track of the time? Do you have a passion for what you do?

Passion and commitment have long been associated with the lives of successful people. It’s not always about the fame or the money or the power. It’s about commitment to something larger than your self. It’s about what you can accomplish that might make a difference in the world.

Jonathan Fields has written a great new book, Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love. [1] While not cutting edge new material, the book does compile a range of useful information about ways to make money from your passion – a sort of primer for those seeking to gain personal traction on the issue.

The book includes exercises to help you find your passion, tips for conducting research and launching a new business and stories about the success of others to inspire you.

If you are not currently pursuing your passion, Career Renegade might be a useful read.

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[1] Jonathan Fields, Career Renegade: How to Make A Great Living Doing What You Love, Broadway Books, 2009, 288 pages.

Catching the Social Media Wave

The May issue of our periodic email newsletter to clients and friends has been posted to our website at Companies in Transition – May 2009. The lead article in this issue is about catching the social media wave and includes the following articles:

• Catching the Social Media Wave - Facebook and twitter are all the rage now, but can they really be effective business tools?

• Has your company reached a strategic inflection point? – The key business fundamentals may be changing but the management challenges remain the same.
  

• Yogi Berra was right when he said... – What can companies in transition learn from Yogi?

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Invest During Hard Times

-         Craig Barrett, former Intel CEO

Owner/CEOs often find it difficult to invest during difficult economic times. And yet, it is the investments made now which will drive revenue growth when the current economic recession ends. The challenge is to reduce spending while preserving or increasing investment. What’s the difference?

Investments support or drive increases in revenues and profitability. Spending is the cash disbursed for everything else which does not meet the investment definition. Like politicians, spending sponsors will argue vociferously that their particular program / budget / personnel are necessary investments and are absolutely essential for the health and even the survival of the enterprise. It is simply not true.

Finding funds for investment requires reducing large amounts of spending. Most managers are tempted to start with the free coffee in the employees’ lounge and the travel budget. There is often not enough money here to make a difference. Instead, challenge programs, markets, product lines, customer concentrations, and significant research and development programs.

Can the particular program or activity make a difference in the trajectory of the business and if successful will it be big enough to matter? The chief decision maker must be brutal in choosing among all of the good ideas. Only the very best should be funded; everything else must be jettisoned. The future of your business depends on it.

Do you know where your people are?

For parents, worrying about the health and welfare of their children is a lifelong obsession. Reaching adulthood is merely the end of one phase in the relationship and the beginning of another more complicated one.

Employee relationships work the same way. Hiring talented new associates is often the easy part. Holding on to them and facilitating their productive engagement in the organization is a lot tougher.

Consider some of the lessons of parenting:

• Your employees are your partners not your serfs – your relationships with employees will generally be more effective if you meet them as equals. Your roles may vary based on experience and responsibility, but you are all on the same team.

• Your employees have ideas, too, and they are not the same as yours – we could all benefit from a lot more listening and a lot less talking. Besides, they own the future; we are mired in the past.

• The world is different now, but the stories are the same – I am already hearing the “oh Dad” when I commence what my children refer to as a “when I was a child” story. The challenge is to engage both children and employees through time-tested stories about integrity and excellence but cast those stories in terms that are more relevant to their lives and jobs.

Would you buy a nice house or investment property and then let it fall into disrepair? Your people are far more valuable than any investment property.

What's your agenda?

Do your professional advisers understand your agenda? Have they even asked you about it?

As the new general manager of a two hundred million dollar company, I had a clear agenda – ensure the company’s economic survival and position it for sustainable future growth. Every decision I made was focused on those two strategic objectives.

Consultants and other professional advisers who could help me advance my agenda were welcome partners in the struggle. Those merely attempting to sell me something were vendors to be squeezed for the best possible deal if not simply shown the door.

To be effective, an adviser must be able to:

• Put themselves in your shoes, to appreciate the pressures and concerns you face
• Draw out your most pressing issues through thoughtful and creative questions
• Help you shape your agenda through supportive, but intellectually honest discourse
• Deliver bold, forceful advice consistent with your mutual understanding of the challenges you face

Effective, empathic advisers are few and far between. Keep looking until you find one, and then don’t turn loose.

Get some smart people to challenge you!

Business owner/CEOs can get so wrapped up in our own plans and worldviews that we miss our full potential, or worse we can be heading for a ditch without realizing it! Physicists call it a closed feedback loop. In lay terms, if we only talk to ourselves, we will only hear our own voices.

One of the essential roles of a board of directors or board of advisors is to challenge and vet the ideas and plans proposed by management. The end result should be that good plans are strengthened and poor plans are discarded or significantly re-worked.

My best investor relations meetings were the ones with the toughest analysts who asked the most difficult questions. They were experts at ferreting out the weak spots in our story, in effect telling us the areas we needed to work on going forward.

Customers and clients are often the best sources of real world feedback. Don’t fight them; embrace them. Your future may depend on it.

20 Ways to Cut Costs

Business owner/CEOs all struggle during turbulent economic times with the dilemma: revenue is falling and profits are disappearing; do I focus on stabilizing/growing revenue or do I cut costs to minimize the profit erosion?

The truth is you have to do both!

ZweigWhite, consultants and advisors to architectural and engineering service firms, is offering a DVD program 20 Ways to Cut Costs: Cut wasteful spending and improve profitability.

While their list is specific to professional services firms, it’s a great place for any business to start:

• Unbillable principal-level staff
• Sacred cow administrative assistants and secretaries
• Unused office space or overly expensive office space
• Outside professional services
• Insurance
• Lights, heat and more
• Company vehicles
• Excess luxuries
• Employee benefits
• Unnecessary overtime
• Principal salaries and perks
• Non-billable travel
• Dumb, dead, or too small branch offices
• Unnecessary meetings
• Recruiting expenses
• Family members on the payroll
• Training for the sake of training
• Library and subscriptions
• Professional society dues and meetings
• "Don’t be left out" marketing expenses

Costs come in two varieties:

1. Investments that support current revenues or generate new revenues, and
2. Other spending, which is the profit leaking out of your business

Click here to order the program.

Applying ‘The Only Three Questions That Count’

I have been reading Ken Fisher’s The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don’t. Ken’s focus and business is managing stock portfolios at Fisher Investments but his questions and methods can also be applied to running a business.

Here are Ken’s three questions:

Question 1 - What do you believe that is actually false?

This one really set me back because it can be applied to everything you do. Life, investing and business are filled with myths. You think you know what your customers want, but have you asked them? You think you know what your competitors are up to, but have you gone into the market to see? You suspect that some of your employees are not happy working for you, but have you tried to find out why?

Question 2 - What can you fathom that others find unfathomable?

This is classic specialist, niche marketing for business owner/CEOs. How can you own a particular market segment? What products or services could address an unmet need? Or meet that need better, quicker, or cheaper? What knowledge, organizational, facility, design or production investments need to be made to position your company uniquely in that market?

Question 3 - What the heck is my brain doing to blindside me now?

This question could be summed up as “we see what we expect to see and we are simply blind to what we do not expect to see.” Each of us have pre-conceived notions or screens that filter the information we receive from our environment. Problems arise when the information we expect to see is incorrect or irrelevant to our situation, or worse, the information we filter out (are blind to) is warning us of impending disaster!

Business success is partly about the ability to challenge and vet what we see and hear. We might do well to start by challenging ourselves first.