photo credit: ericmcgregor

When it was just you and you were a bulletproof superhero, you could remember it all.

You could look at code you wrote six months earlier and you knew exactly what it did and why you wrote it that way.

A bit of time has passed since then. You’ve hired new people. Because you didn’t write good technical documentation back then (or didn’t keep it up to date), there are many mysteries about your business buried deep inside the heads of your most senior, most expensive staff.

And now, they’re being interrupted repeatedly with every new hire because the new person needs the knowledge stored in the heads of the “old ones” in order to do their job and learn your business.

You want a new programmer to hit the ground running. To become as productive as possible as quickly as possible.

Think back to the last new person you hired. Remember that ramp-up period?

Now imagine hiring three or five at once. Just try to get something productive done while they are getting up to speed. You (and whoever is managing them) probably have other tasks to do, perhaps very high ROI tasks. Without strong technical, application/market and process documentation, those tasks are going to get incessantly interrupted with things that should have been documented.

Sure, you’ll get brilliant questions that you might not have foreseen. The other 912 questions likely could be answered in your internal wiki or other documentation. Or you could enjoy their visits to your office, their emails, IMs, texts and phone calls, while pondering the time they’re wasting by getting you them both out of the zone every time they have questions.

Your choice.

PS: Just because you aren’t a programmer or don’t have programmers doesn’t mean you’re immune to this.

photo credit: Kai Brinker

Not long ago, we talked about reviewing the recent performance of your business and making adjustments based on what you find.

We ended that conversation like this…

Beyond the bumps, there’s something missing here. Reacting after the fact.

Assessment and adjustment after the bleeding starts. Evaluating what’s going on because the calendar says so.

Does that make sense in an ultra-competitive world? I think there has to be a better way.

One reason for this is human nature. If you feel you don’t have to stop and take the time to assess / measure what’s going on as often as I say or as often as the calendar says, you’re going to do it less often than you should.

Eventually, you can expect that to hurt.

By the dashboard light

This isn’t about killing pain or temporarily avoiding that hurt. I’d prefer to *prevent* the pain if possible. Wouldn’t you?

To set the context for one approach to preventing the pain, think about your car.

You don’t pull off of the highway to check your car’s speed, water and oil temperature. Your car’s dashboard provides information about its current condition while you’re moving, eliminating the need to pull over, stop, get out, change clothes, look under the hood and get your hands dirty. Not to mention how hard it is to judge your speed that way.

If your car requires immediate attention, something on your dashboard lights up so that you can’t help but notice it and (hopefully) attend to it.

Seems to me that you would benefit if your business could do that. Rather than waiting for you to sit down, crunch numbers and summarize things so you can make a decision – the equivalent of pulling off the highway and looking under the hood – why not setup your business to self-report just like your car?

Trends and Emergencies

In business situations requiring immediate attention, you want to know right then – much like the dashboard “idiot light” but smarter.

Rather than waiting to arrive at those “immediate attention” situations, it would be even better if your business notified you when conditions existed that could lead to a situation like that, giving you the time to take action or make a decision before things get ugly.

Sure, sometimes “immediate attention” situations happen instantly with no warning, but that really isn’t typical.

More often than not, there are leading indicators to the impending crisis. As your business operates, it creates feedback information about itself, about events that occur (such as customer interactions, so-many-days-since-they-paid) and so on. Yes, this is obvious. Each of those pieces of information trends in some direction, even if that direction is “same as last month”.

If they start trending toward that “Check engine” light, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest you’d want to know that well before the light comes on.

More than a handful

Keeping track of 100 of these by hand is almost impossible, or at least way more work than most people want to do or see ROI in. As a result, we might keep track of a small handful by hand. If we could monitor them in an automated fashion, we could monitor quite a few handfuls without extra effort. That would allow us to spend more time improving our business (much less doing business) and let our automated monitors tell us what we might otherwise not notice.

For example, when a trend direction starts to change over a predetermined period of time (or amount, or in too many areas at once), you want to know about it sooner rather than later. In your car, you want to find out about your coolant getting too warm *before* it overheats and strands you in the middle of nowhere at the worst possible time.

Dirty Hands

While an automated dashboard is great for keeping you out from under the hood on a daily basis, it’s still sometimes necessary to get your hands dirty. Don’t let your automated systems tempt you into avoiding this effort.

These systems allow you to keep substantially better track of more things on a day to day basis without spending all day “checking, checking, checking”. They educate you about problems far earlier than normal and let you focus on the real work – the stuff that creates revenue and profit.

photo credit: chrisdlugosz

Seventy-five percent of the calendar year is behind you.

Can the same be said for the year’s goals, income expectations, etc?

Will you wait until the end of the year to plan your next 6-12-18 months or are you doing it now?

How often do you review the results of your work?

On the other hand…does it really matter? I mean, is there really a good reason to defer the decision about when you reassess your business to a schedule designed almost 500 years ago?

Yes, I mean the monthly calendar.

What can you do better on January 2 that you can’t assess, decide and plan on today or perhaps next weekend?

Wait

As in “Why wait?”

Business owners assess the financial position of their business on a regular basis since they have to make payroll (no matter what that means to your business) and pay bills. Today’s software and banking systems provide up to the minute balance info.

Thing is, so do most other aspects of your business.  But do you use them?

Are you assessing the rest of your business as often as your financials?

Are you adjusting your plans based on the results you’ve measured in the last week, month, quarter? Have the first three quarters of this year changed what you’re implementing now? Are you re-inventing the rest of this year? Does it need it? Whether things are better or worse, if you are waiting till the end of the year to adjust….why?

Do you only look at your gas gauge when you leave the house and arrive at your destination? Why do that with your business?

Do the bumps your business encountered this year matter? What would you do differently if they came along again?

Bumps

My plans for this year got hit by a bus in April.

I was fortunate because I had been able to position myself to grab some clothes, my laptop and phone and head out the door if I needed to deal with an unplanned emergency. Unfortunately, that emergency happened.

While it still had an impact on my work – I was still able to respond as I wished vs. not being able to do anything or worse, do far less than what I would have liked. That’s a regret you don’t want to have if you can help it, but you’ll probably have to plan for it.

Planning for the work, if you can’t outsource it, is another thing entirely. What can you outsource? What can you outsource if you HAVE to?

Your plans might take a hit next month. Tis better to be prepared than not, even if you can’t be perfectly ready.

Expect bumps. Plan for them. Sometimes the worst case scenario comes true. If it doesn’t, you can be grateful that it didn’t.

If a bump occurs, no matter how bad, coming back for it might look something like this: React, respond, recover, realign, restructure, reset, restart.

Is that all?

Beyond the bumps, there’s something missing here. Reacting after the fact. Assessment and adjustment after the bleeding starts. Evaluating what’s going on because the calendar says so.

Does that make sense in an ultra-competitive world? I think there has to be a better way.

We’ll talk about that next time.

photo credit: Abhisek Sarda

Last week I was talking with a friend who was celebrating, or at the very least – remembering, the fact that a certain day this week marked the 10th year on the job at his employer’s business.

10 years. How many people do you know that have had the same job for 10 years? I’ll bet the number is smaller than it used to be.

A decade or two ago, it was commonplace to have the same job for 10 years. In the decades of my parents’ work life, 25 or more years wasn’t unusual at one job.

Recent research indicates that people entering the workforce will have as many as 30 jobs during their lifetime. Meanwhile, some of today’s employers are often heard lamenting the attitude of the supposedly uncaring young people they employ, not realizing that their actions often provoke the attitude they perceive.

The “all corporations are evil” tribe members out there will likely be quick to paint all employers with this uncaring brush, but that would be intellectually dishonest of them. While some certainly fit that mold, numerous large businesses treat their employees as if they’re critical to accomplishing their mission. You already know their names.

To be sure, some companies struggle with ethical, accountable behavior. When businesses hit rough times, some organizations will have employees who continue to show loyalty and deliver quality work. Guess which ones? The rest may look like a rodent-infested, Renaissance-era sailing ship slipping below the water – people won’t be able to leave fast enough. But they will, because their management will have made it so it just isn’t worth it anymore.

Is that really what this birthday thing is about? Of course not. It’s about common courtesy. Remember that?

Little Things

As I learned more about this employee’s work anniversary and how the day went, it became clear through the conversation that no one at this business remembered the date (who would after 10 years?). No wonder there was no mention of the anniversary.

No, it’s not a huge issue, unless you’re that employee.

Keep in mind that:

• Someone who feels valued, even by the smallest of occasional gestures, will think nothing of doing a little extra when asked. Sometimes even when not asked. Remember, they’re the front line between you and your customers more often than not.
• Someone who feels like they are just another brick in the wall tends to be made to feel that way over time. Little signals like the anniversary thing send the message that staffers are taken for granted are received, perhaps intermittently, but they continue to arrive.

For most adults, work is more than a paycheck. It’s part of who we are at some level. If it isn’t for someone on your staff, ask yourself how that adult came to feel that way about their work.

What you are vs. who you are

Sometimes the little things people do to recognize events like this 10 year anniversary are the ones that remind them that they’re more than a “(whatever you make/create/repair)”.

Imagine the conversation I would’ve had with that person if their general manager, regional manager  or (gasp) the home office sent the guy a hand written note. Two minutes to write it. What message does that send?

Imagine the value of a phone call or an off-location cup of coffee with an employee who has seen your business change and adapt over the last 10 years. Remember the year. This particular anniversary means the hire happened just after 9/11, when very few were hiring.

Any number of small things could have been done. A small “10″ on a new name tag. A name badge that’s a different color, with “10 years” on it. A custom fitted company ball cap with “10 years” across the back. Any number of inexpensive gestures.

Perhaps something as inexpensive and priceless as a handshake and a sincere “Thank you”.

How difficult?

How difficult and expensive would it be to put every new hire’s start date into a private-to-your-business Google calendar? Hark, I hear the cries of privacy advocates, so talk to your HR folks before making this egregious error (that was sarcasm, mostly). That Google calendar will automatically email or text you to remind you of each date.

Your work is almost done, but keep in mind that your Google calendar can’t put meaning into that handshake.

You have to do that.

UPDATE: Want some hints on how to improve how you thank your staff? Check this out:

photo credit: Caveman Chuck Coker

Ever walked out of a store, or ended a phone call with a business and thought “Man, what a hassle. Why do they make it so hard for me to give them my money?”

For example, I mostly read the news online but I like an old school Sunday paper. Problem is, I can’t get the Sunday paper delivered locally because the company that publishes it won’t sell Sunday-only subscriptions – not even at a premium.

To be sure, that’s a choice they have the right to make, but… it’s a hassle.

As a result, I either:

1) Stumble out the door in my robe at 6 am, shuffle to the end of the driveway, grab the Sunday paper, walk back inside and park myself in the recliner to enjoy a hot cuppa Joe and read the paper. Except that my house isn’t on a route that gets a paper by 6am, at least not the last time I subscribed. I mean, the paper guy doesn’t beam them to me, so *someone* has to be at 6am and someone else has to be at 6:05am so that really isn’t a complaint. Oh and I have to subscribe to everyday delivery to do that, even though I just want the paper on Sunday.

or

2) Get dressed (which would probably make the neighbors happier), warm up the car, drive to a convenience store, get some change at the register, go outside to the machine to grab a paper, drive home and *then* park myself in the recliner, etc.

As I said, it’s a hassle. So much so that I lose the habit of doing it.

Thought to avoid: I suspect their sales department thinks this situation will somehow encourage me to include “Subscribe seven days a week” as my third choice, but it really doesn’t. Instead, the hassle breaks the habit. I also don’t want to create a big pile of paper to recycle. It’s a hassle.

Picky? Me?

Like many of yours, I can be a picky customer. This isn’t a rant against a newspaper – that would be rather ironic given that a version of this blog is published in a, uh, newspaper. I’m just setting the context so you have an idea what you need to watch out for.

Hassles are what causes great businesses to be started. It’s why Blockbuster started. Ironically enough, hassle is what also killed Blockbuster (because Netflix cured those hassles). Of course, recently Netflix created their own hassles. It’s the circle of life, I guess.

The other day I read a tweet that said “when you focus on the numbers, you forget the customer.”  That’s a little extreme, but if you know the context, it’s right on. Take care of the customer and they’ll take care of you.

What about you?

I’ve mentioned here before that one of my local banks years ago eliminated a long-standing hassle – that deposits made today but after some arbitrary now-irrelevant time (like 3:00 pm) are not credited till the next day. That’s a change that makes it obvious they understand at least one of the challenges business owners face. It’s a bank you *want* to do business with.

Now you can check the mail, grab the checks and head to the bank at the end of the day, not at mid-afternoon prime work time. That’s how you get rid of a hassle.

If you look around, you may find that you create a few hassles for your customers. Rather than waste a lot of time staring at things – you could just ask them.

“Is it a hassle doing business with us?”, “If it ever a pain to deal with us? When?”, “What’s more trouble than it’s worth when it comes to working with us?” or something like that is all it will take.

Hassles mean lost sales

Before long I’ll have to get the wood stove and snowblower serviced. If the guys who do that work really wanted to remove a hassle, they’d send me a postcard, an email or call me to schedule that work. In the case of the snowblower, maybe even offer to pick it up for an extra $15 or so.

Some customers might not have trailers, or would be happy to borrow one just long enough to run home, grab the machine and bring it back. No worries about getting it there and back = One less hassle. Or maybe two.

How can you make it easier for them to give you their money?

For that matter, how can you make everything easier?

photo credit: audreyjm529

Last time (in the context of being trusted, and what a business must do to re-establish trust), I talked briefly about vendors who announce software years before they plan to ship it, including firms that never ship what they’ve announced and taken payment for.

On occasion, early announcements are a legal requirement for some businesses. IBM and the terms of their consent decree, for example.

Delivery problems can be made worse by substantial changes in market conditions that can make the announced product irrelevant. In some cases, a failure to deliver is irrelevant because the product is so late that it no longer matters. The totally rewritten Netscape is one such example.

Sometimes the product doesn’t meet the expectations it originally set for potential customers even if market conditions haven’t changed. On very rare occasions, a failure to deliver is intentional/fraudulent but that’s for legal blogs to discuss.

How do delivery problems happen?

Delivery problems are frequently born months or even years before they reveal themselves. They happen because the firm involved has internal development (yes, management) problems.

While hidden, these problems can lull a business into taking advance payment for a product that they cannot dream of delivering in the short term – even though their intention is to do just that.

Symptoms of a software business with development problems can include:

• Inability to deliver a consistently high quality product.
• They can’t name a date and deliver on that date occasionally, much less time after time.
• They don’t know with any confidence if they will ship on a particular date until that date is too close to do anything about their ability to reach it.
• They fail to design to a detailed enough level of granularity and get surprised during the development process, finding that something allocated to two days or two weeks instead requires four months of work.
• They fail to focus on the task at hand and occasionally find themselves chasing a “bright shiny object” that has at best a tangential relationship to their announced product goals.
• They work in a vacuum (insulated from their industry and/or their client base) and because of a substantial design/strategic product miscalculation, it is months or years before they discover it.
• If they accept customization work requests for their core products, it tends to appear “duct taped” on, rather than designed-in.

Businesses that experience one or more of these issues simply haven’t decided to do enough enough to ensure compelling levels of consistency in the product they produce. They haven’t decided (or don’t realize they need) to focus only on the things that ensure an on-time delivery of a quality product. In some cases, they may not even be sure what “on-time” will be.

These things are not “just how it is”. They are decided.

Trust that upgrade?

Think about the one software package you use more than any other. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a development tool (like XCode or Visual Studio), an accounting package (QuickBooks?) or a firmware upgrade for your CNC machine.

• Will you install the next upgrade without first checking to see if someone else has done the bleeding for you?
• Are you confident that you can install the next upgrade right away, or do you wait a few days or weeks to see what the fallout is?
• Do you install new upgrades right away with strong confidence that it’ll be solid?
• Do you install and then spend a pile of time testing obvious things to make sure they still work?
• Do you routinely wait for someone else to “do the bleeding” for you before you decide to install or not?
• Is it common to have to “back off” an upgrade because it broke too many things?

Put that hat on your customers.

What do they do?

Do they install what you ship on the day you ship it? Or do they put off updates until they have no choice – such as when industry specification and/or governmental rule changes require use of the upgraded version.

That’s an indicator of their trust in your development and testing process. In YOU.

Problems like this aren’t just about software businesses and aren’t about upscale quality. It’s about management consistently doing the things that create trust. This kind of trust applies to plumbers, coffee roasters, political candidates and construction companies – and many others.

You trust that even the cheapest generic milk from the store won’t have hair or bug body parts floating in it. You trust that when you flip a wall switch, the power will come on.

To produce high levels of trust in your work requires a decision: “We will do what it takes to become (or remain) the trusted party.”

photo credit: Andrew Morrell Photography

Earning, retaining and regaining the trust of your customers has been central to this blog from the beginning.

We talk about a lot of different things that all come down to creating an atmosphere of trust with your clientele. That trust will build a relationship and that relationship, even if impersonal, is what makes business personal to your customers.

A few questions came out of recent conversations on these topics and the best ones were these:

• How can an impersonal business relationship truly be personal?
• How does a vendor recover from a massive loss of trust?

Come on, Steeeeve

How can an impersonal business relationship truly be personal?

Easy…it starts with trust.

For example, I have a relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Do we know each other personally, like I do some of my readers? No.

Despite that, I know enough about him from his behavior and the behavior of his company to trust him – at least enough to invest in his company’s products and recommend them to others who trust me.

His behavior and the behavior of his company over time tell me a few things:

I trust that when he walks on stage to speak about new products:

• He is going to announce things will often seem as if they were designed specifically for my use. Not because he has me on speed dial, but because his company has habitually built products which do just that.
• He is going to announce products that will be publicly available today or very soon.

How is that different from others?

Some companies build something not to fill a need their customers have expressed,  or a need that they’ve discovered through vision and research, but because (for example) they compete with Apple in some other way and perhaps feel obligated to compete there too.

Those conversations seem to start with “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” or “Well, if so-and-so did it, so can we…”

When you come to market with a product with that much R&D behind it and no one blinks… somewhere, somehow, your company simply isn’t listening well.

Example, HP just cancelled WebOS and their TouchPad tablet one day after Best Buy publicly complained they’d only managed to sell 25,000 of the 270,000 devices they ordered. While it seems to me that this is a strategic buying error on Best Buy’s part, it isn’t as if HP can’t be held accountable for making a product that can’t compete in the marketplace. No question that the iPad and other devices hurt them badly, but they’ve known about the iPad since at least January 2010.

Again…listen well.

Some vendors announce new products years before they plan to ship – and in some cases they never deliver them. In the most extreme cases, they pre-sell them and then fail to deliver. Some repeatedly toss out anticipated release dates and never meet any of them. Try recovering from a misstep like that, even if it wasn’t intentional.

Trust starts in the mirror

How does a vendor recover from a massive loss of trust?

At the risk of being Mr. Obvious, you start recovering by earning back the trust you lost (or earning what you never had).

Start with this: Say what you’ll do, then do what you said. If you stumble, own up to it. Seem too simple? Laugh it off if you like, but as Tom Peters says “There’s not much traffic on the extra mile.”

Some of you will point to Jerry over there and you’ll say “He’ll never come back no matter what we do.”

You might be right, but more Jerrys will leave if you keep acting the way you do now. If you don’t change, how can you expect them to? Even if you don’t get Jerry back, there are others who will recognize your efforts with each bit of trust you earn.

Each customer you lose because of something you did to lose the trust of that customer. You delivered late. You didn’t deliver at all. Your quality was poor. You treated them poorly.

These problems can be repaired. Just like trust.

photo credit: e³°°°

I got an email from Amazon this morning about a Kindle book called “Before your next meeting“.

The Kindle / Kindle reader software version of the book is free until August 9, 2011.

It’s a quick read and perhaps the most meaningful you’ll read if you are in an organization that has a lot of meetings.

Let’s say you have a 30 minute meeting between your staff every weekday and that there are 7 people in attendance from the sales clerk to the CEO.

If you do a little meeting math, you’ll find that 30 minutes times 7 people times 5 days per week = 1,050 minutes per week. Over SEVENTEEN HOURS every week.

If you don’t feel that you’re getting 17 hours of productivity out of those meetings every week, maybe this book is worth reading. It’s short, sweet and to the point. Oh, and free until Aug 9.

If you prefer, you could call a meeting to decide whether or not to read it.

NOTE: You do not need a Kindle to read this book. You just need the Kindle reader software, which is free for the same device you’re using to read this post.

photo credit: Peter Gorges

Feedback-wise…

• A great client is one who asks tough questions incessantly, almost always in a polite manner.
• A good client is one who asks tough questions regularly, sometimes politely.
• A bad customer is one who asks poor questions, regardless of how they ask them.

Tough questions are your friend. They’re like competitors because they make you better. Or at least, they should.

As for those that aren’t yet great? Your job is to help them achieve it.

Photo credit: Michael Hyatt

When book publisher Michael Hyatt posted this image saying “When you read this at Panera, you know your city has a water problem”, it struck me as a business problem.

Sure, the city might have a problem, but that shouldn’t be your customers’ problem.

Every day, we must adapt to the cards we’re dealt.

Rather than “We are not serving tap water, sodas or brewed tea today” and taking what might be perceived as a political shot at the city (the same one who does their next restaurant inspection?), a customer-centered management team could have called Culligan (et al) to get all the restaurant-approved water they’d need to provide glasses of water and brewed tea.

If you’re Culligan, there’s a win-win there.

Perhaps you can’t easily and quickly alter the water supply for a soda dispensing system, but that still doesn’t require a sign.

A quick look at last week’s sales totals from the register would have told them that they sell 430 sodas per day on average and run over to Costco or Sam’s (or called their normal supplier) for a canned/bottled supply that would span the gap for them.

The next work day, they could consult with their soda mix supplier and explain the situation further, ask for advice on water supply adaptation and then contact their plumber to arrange for a way to feed the third-party water into their soda system. Or they simply could have adapted using pre-mix, though that would probably be too much of an interference to the restaurant’s workflow.

Instead, they chose to sell no soda and no tea (both high profit margin items) and take a shot at the city.

Maybe the city needed a smack, but the place to do that is at the city offices, at a council meeting and worst case, in the local press.

Using your customers as pawns in that game makes for a losing battle, especially when they are standing at your front door with their wallets and purses open.

PS: Interesting that coffee wasn’t mentioned on that sign. Might be because many places use high-tech water filtration systems for their coffee water supply lines. I wonder if a non-franchise restaurant would have reacted the same way.

photo credit: Max Braun

A few weeks ago, we talked about the importance of strategic delegation and how it might just enable you to enjoy a phone call free vacation, much less free up some hugely important strategic thinking time.

When I was in the photography software business, I quickly learned that photographers absolutely detest being pulled out of the camera room to answer the phone.

Likewise, if I emailed them about something urgent (usually because they said it was urgent), they’d often respond hours later saying that they had been in the camera room and hadn’t seen my email.

It’s not as if they were hiding from us. Usually we were trying to contact them to help them resolve a problem, train them or answer a question.

But you don’t pull them out of the camera room.

It’s not Disneyland

The camera room isn’t a magical place, but it is where they make their money. It’s where the backgrounds, props, lights and cameras are. It’s where their clients are when they are creating their masterpiece, which results in revenue. They DO NOT like being interrupted while they are in there, just in case I wasn’t clear.

Technical jobs (programming, engineering, etc) work the same way. While performing detailed, highly-technical work; these workers despise being interrupted. We get into the zone, into a flow, we get clear, whatever you call it.

Interrupting us from this work after immersing ourselves in it is expensive and annoying. It takes a while (15-20 minutes or more) to get back to the zone where we can be productive with all the right stuff in our head.

And then the door to your office opens because someone wants to know where the toilet paper is or what place we have planned for lunch.

In an instant, you’re out of the zone. Even if you aren’t “technical”.

Produce a Procedures Manual

One thing that helps reduce these interruptions is having a procedures manual. Just because it’s called a manual doesn’t mean it has to be printed. It might be a wiki or a really long MS Word document. It doesn’t matter as long as it is documented and accessible by anyone who needs to perform a task at your business.

This manual might prevent you from getting a call on a Sunday afternoon at dinner time because someone went into the office to plan their week (or pick up something they forgot), and realized that they don’t know how to turn on the alarm.

Or the alarm is going off and the police are there and they want to know how to turn it off, so they call you while you’re in the doctor’s office, on the beach, etc. Worse yet is when they can’t reach you, so they leave without turning the alarm on, or similarly less-than-ideal situations.

Important Safety Tip

There is no process that must be done regularly in your business that is too trivial to leave out of this documentation.

Yes, I said no process too trivial.

One reason I suggest that is that someday you will have a new employee. They will start at the bottom. They won’t know anything.

And they’ll pull you out of the camera room (or your equivalent) every five minutes to ask you about this or that if you don’t have anything else (like a procedures manual) to provide this instruction.

Certainly there will be enough face to face contact as it is. In the old consultant’s home, you’ll hear us muttering something along the lines of “What’s worse than spending the time and effort to train an employee who stays for years? NOT training them and having them stay for years.”

I know you’ll train them. Really I do. Still, there are things that simply shouldn’t require hands-on training. They might be performed by a temporary employee.

These tasks will often be mundane, ranging from opening the store, to packaging to closing the store at the end of the day to turning off the alarm when set off by mistake.

Each is one less “really good reason” to pull you (or someone else) out of the zone.

photo credit: Bas Lammers

Recently, the Flathead Beacon published a story about a global tech-oriented business that continues to grow right here in rural Montana.

This business started from scratch and achieved critical mass…

• Without tax breaks that often encourage unsustainable business models.
• Without specially crafted laws that treat their industry or part of their industry “more fairly” than others. Rhetorical sidebar: What exactly is “more fairly”?
• Without the work of half a dozen lobbyists in Helena or Washington.

In other words, they started just like your business likely did, probably using the same methods most small business owners use – the same thing that I suggested when we talked about the fitness center just a few days ago.

They found a need and they filled it.

Several years back, I remember sitting in a coffee shop next to someone interviewing a candidate for a job with what was then the startup roots of the company discussed in the article.

The discussion and the numbers I overheard told me they were serious, sustainable and positioned well. I’m really glad to see this business continue to grow.

In good economies and bad, your business model has to make sense on its own, no matter what’s going on in the state capitol and DC, and no matter who is in the White House.

1926 Ford Model T photo: digitizedchaos

Henry Ford, despite his success with the assembly line at Ford Motor Company, made a mistake that many business owners still make today.

He didn’t delegate.

Most business owners delegate at least a little. Not Ford.

According to Peter Drucker, the senior Ford didn’t believe in delegation or floor management and it cost him plenty. Fortunately, he had the millions, if not billions, to backup what is now commonly considered a sizable error in judgment. We do, of course, have the benefit of a century of hindsight.

Ford’s son, Henry II, felt differently about the delegation of management. He believed that having management on the factory floor was critical. That decision was one of the keys to turning their family business around from a financially perspective.

Delegation is Efficient, Strategic

Ford II understood that leadership had a place in the assembly line factory floor back then as much as it does now in any business that has employees.

He discovered that empowering factory floor managers with the power to make decisions within the authority granted to them resulted in a savings of time and money. I suspect it also resulted in a safer factory floor in an era that isn’t known for having safe manufacturing workplaces. It’s also likely that the decisions made were better than (or the same) as those Mr. Ford might have made, since they were made based on those managers’ day to day experience on the factory floor.

That has several benefits we’ll talk about shortly, but it isn’t the number one reason to delegate. Your time is the biggest reason.

If you are focused on making the small decisions, every minute you spend on them is taken from the time available to research and make big decisions.

If the big decisions that affect your business long-term aren’t getting the proper amount of analysis, what problems could you miss? More importantly, what opportunities could you miss the importance of, if not miss completely?

Return on You

I can’t sit here and tell you exactly what to delegate and what to do yourself. What I can suggest is that you consider if something can be delegated to another person when you put that task on your todo list or schedule. You could do this daily, as you add things to the list, as you finish the task or whatever works for you. The key is that you actually do it.

Maybe you have to do it yourself this time, but make another todo to prepare as necessary to delegate that task next time. That way, when it comes up, you’re prepared to delegate without delay.

I’ve already made note of the value of being able to focus on the important stuff. Yes, this is the Department of Obvious Obviousness stuff, but I see enough of it that it’s worth repeating.

An additional benefit is that you might be the highest paid person at your business. If so, do you want to be doing things, management or otherwise, that someone who makes less than you *could* do? Being willing to mop the floor is essential. Doing it yourself, when you could outsource it or delegate it, allows you to focus on and work on valuable work that grows your business.

You wouldn’t hire someone to mop the floor and pay them $75 an hour. Yet that’s exactly what doing it yourself might be, effectively.

Fertilize Your Garden

One of the other benefits of empowering people on the floor (in the cubicle, on the road, whatever) is that you make that person more valuable.

Just like compost or fertilizer strengthens the plants in a garden, empowering your staff has a similar impact.

It engages them more closely in your business, makes them worth more in the marketplace (and thus to your business) and allows them to gain more skill in making decisions. The better they get, the less time you spend on those decisions, giving you more time to focus on the big picture.

Failure to “fertilize your garden” leads to the next topic…

Vacationus Interruptus

Once in a great while, you probably like to take a day off.

You’d love to leave for a week and come back to a business without 100 emails about decisions that “couldn’t be made while you were gone”.

You’d probably love to take a vacation and not have your cell ring every hour with a question about a decision that, now that you’re on vacation, seems like an annoying interruption.

Empower. Delegate. And enjoy that vacation.

Just had to share this video from Honda on failure.

Good, good stuff to share with your team.

photo credit: joiseyshowaa

One of the things Scoutmasters teach their Scouts is the Scout motto – “Be Prepared.”

We don’t stand around saying those words all that much (or ever, really).

When I ask a Scout what it means to them, I get a lot of different answers. I talk about it with the boys because I’m curious what it means to them – which tells me where they are preparedness-wise.

Depending on their age and their seriousness when I ask the question, I hear answers that include things like:

• knowing how to select the right gear for a campout,
• having the right fishing lures,
• making sure that bacon is on the menu (not kidding),
• being in good enough shape for the upcoming hike,
• making sure the car is full of gas and has proper levels of other fluids/air and so on,
• having charged batteries in the camera,
• having a sharpened pocket knife,
• knowing how to tie a rescue knot, or
• having the proper gear to safely canoe or kayak a river/stream.

What it ultimately means to me is being prepared for what life/business serves up, whether it’s a class V rapid, an unexpected flat tire during a snowstorm in a remote area, that five figure invoice that your “customer” still hasn’t paid, the new box store down the street, mention of your business in the Wall Street Journal, by Scoble and on TechCrunch, or stumbling upon an idea that changes your life and/or business.

Embarrassment? No.

To someone who has a job, I ask them what they would do if they lost their job today? Are they honing a new or enhanced skill so that they can react quickly to a downturn in what they’ve done for the past 20 years? Do they have a network of people in their current (or desired) line of work that could help them identify opportunities?

To someone who has a business, I might ask them what would happen if the building housing their business burned down, or if their biggest customer stopped buying from them, or if they suddenly got 100 new customers tomorrow.

I don’t ask these questions to embarrass employees or business owners any more than I ask them to embarrass a Scout when asking them what would happen if their friend cut his hand or lost his water bottle on a week-long hike. I ask them so they’ll think about their level of preparedness.

Being prepared isn’t just about having a poncho in case it rains, having backups offsite, and having a marketing plan that never stops finding new customers for you. It’s also about being mentally prepared to deal with what happens next.

Be prepared, not only to take a punch, but to make big leaps when opportunities present themselves.

photo credit: kevindooley

Not long ago, a little boy was murdered.

Soon after, his grandpa was traveling to see his little 3 year old grandson one last time.

He was running for the plane, desperately late despite getting to the airport several hours before departure.

After two hours of standing in line, pleading with TSA officials and airline employees to help him get to his gate on time, his perception was that no one seemed to care how important it was to make that plane.

Waiting

While the drama takes place in the ticket and security line, the airplane was sitting at the gate.

Waiting, waiting and more waiting.

It’s a Southwest airplane.

Anyone who has traveled with and/or read about Southwest knows that one of their top operational priorities is fast turnaround at the airport’s gate.

It’s simple. Planes make money in the air. They don’t make money sitting at the gate.

Southwest takes that to heart. Their focus on at-the-gate efficiency is so well polished that they can turn a plane from arrival to departure in 20 minutes, 2-3 times faster than many competitors.

Every employee is well aware of that focus.

The grapevine

Somehow, someone at the gate found out.

Despite the focus on turnaround and the potential risk to their jobs, the ticketing agent and pilot refused to move the plane away from the gate until the grandpa arrived.

People know to make these kinds of decisions every day, but they often don’t out of fear for their jobs or the specter of “policy”.

The wrong kind of business culture breeds that behavior.

The right kind of business culture empowers their employees to make decisions that are the right ones for the customer at that moment, even if they temporarily fly in the face of business policy or strategic goals. They hire and train with those things in mind.

The agent and pilot knew what should be done and took action.

Loyalty

Who do you think that grandpa and family fly with in the future?

Opportunities to create life-long loyalty are fleeting. Make the most of the ones you get and make sure your people do too.

Especially when it’s the right thing to do.

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

Last time, we talked about those 10 things that cause small businesses to fail, and zeroed in on the business model as most important of all.

There’s usually a reason you got into the business you’re in, but whether you love it or just chose it for the money, the math that makes the business work…actually has to work.

It’s more complicated than how much you spend and how much you make.

How’d you come up with the prices for your stuff?

If you’re a retailer, you probably had someone tell you about keystone. Or maybe you’re using manufacturer’s suggested retail pricing (MSRP). Or maybe you’re 3 cents under your competition because that’s what you felt you needed to do to get the sale.

Ever sit down and figure out how much it costs to open the doors every day – even if you don’t have a door?

Ever think about taxes, licenses, shipping, insurance, and yes…some money for you to take home?

35 prospects

How much does it cost to get 35 people to call you? How much does it cost to get 35 people to visit your store? How much does it cost to get 35 people to visit your website and opt-in to your email newsletter, subscribe to your blog, your YouTube feed or “Like” your Facebook page (or whatever)?

In fact, each of those ways of getting a new prospective customer (often called a “lead”) have differing costs because the advertising (or whatever it took) to motivate them to buy has different pricing and each one convinces different numbers of people to become a prospect.

Note that I said nothing about how many people that advertising reaches. It doesn’t matter if it reaches 35 or 35 million. What matters is how many people raise their hand and say “Hmm, I might be interested. Tell me more.” and show that by calling, stopping in, going to your website and so on for every dollar you spend.

Those things have a cost. In fact, it’d better be an investment. If it isn’t, you’re doing something wrong. Divided by the number of people who said “Hmm”, you know what a prospective customer costs. Most people have no idea what the number is.

Seems like a number you’d care about.

10 customers

Now let’s say 35 of those prospects turn into customers. They buy something.

Each one probably has a different “buying profile”. In other words, customers you meet online might buy different things than walk-in/phone customers do, or they might spend more or less, or they might buy more or less often.

If you don’t pay attention to these things, you won’t know how to deal with them.

You also won’t know which source of buyers purchases the most profitable items, which source returns the most items, and so on. Seems kind of important, doesn’t it?

If you know how much it cost to get those 35 prospects to call you, stop in or what not, AND 10 of them bought something, then you can also figure out how much it costs you (per media, per ad campaign and overall) to get a new customer.

Seems like a number you’d care about.

42 orders

If over the course of a year, these customers place 42 orders or make 42 purchases, you have another important number: cost per sale.

Not cost OF sale. Cost PER sale…to get the sale.

What’d you have to do to get those folks to order or purchase? Nothing? I hope not, because you’re depending on random behavior.

What if that random behavior changes?

If you do expend any time, effort and/or money on marketing, you ought to know which efforts/expenses are working and which aren’t. If one is working, you keep using it and try to improve it’s performance. If one isn’t, you either stop doing it or tinker with it a little and see what you can do to make it work.

Either way, those efforts have a price tag.

Seems like a number you’d care about.

Groundhog Day

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character relives the same day repeatedly. He goes to the same places and buys breakfast (etc) day after day.

What are you doing to encourage that from your customers?

Recurring revenue is a critical part of every (YES EVERY) business model. Maybe not the same person every day, but definitely on a regular basis.

What if you woke up every morning and knew that you’d make 7 sales today, based on some prior effort, history or activity?

What if you knew how much of that effort, history or activity was needed to keep making that happen?

Seems like a number you’d care about.

photo credit: Hamed Saber

A few weeks ago, the NY Times’ “You’re the Boss” blog (which discusses small business topics) had a piece from Chicago entrepreneur Jay Goltz about the 10 reasons small businesses fail.

It’s a laundry list of pretty fundamental stuff, much of which we regularly talk about here:

• a business model whose math doesn’t work,
• owners who can’t get out of their own way
• out-of-control growth
• poor accounting
• insufficient cash cushion
• operational mediocrity
• operational inefficiencies
• dysfunctional management
• lack of a succession plan
• a declining market

Several of the items on this list are things that I encounter not only as a customer, but as someone who helps businesses improve their performance and profitability. Some of them are more frustrating than others. I’ll bet you see them as well.

Jay summed up his comments with this:

“In life, you may have forgiving friends and relatives, but entrepreneurship is rarely forgiving. Eventually, everything shows up in the soup. If people don’t like the soup, employees stop working for you, and customers stop doing business with you. And that is why businesses fail.“

Unforgiving

We recently talked about the market’s lack of forgiveness. If you missed that piece, I noted that I can be as nice as you like when discussing examples I’ve seen that you can learn from, but the market…well, it just won’t be nice or fair about it. It doesn’t benefit you (or the folks I write about) to whitewash things.

So how can you, the head chef of your business, keep these 10 things out of your soup?

Relentless focus and accountability.

I warned my clients at the first of the year that I would be holding them more accountable for their efforts. Not one has rebelled. Those who have been pressed the hardest have responded with the most results. Accountability works.

First things first

If you have a business model whose math doesn’t work, NONE of the other stuff really matters.

The “If there’s plenty of gross there has to be some net around here somewhere” thing is more prevalent than you’d think. People start businesses for all kinds of reasons, but it’s pretty shocking how few pay attention to the math of the business model.

They start out with a price that they THINK makes sense (it might, it might not) and that initial pricing often drives the rest of the business, their marketing (ie: how many sales they need to make) and their operations (how costs are defrayed).

The other nine items on this list are pretty important, but it doesn’t matter AT ALL how well you’re doing at these things if the basic math of your business doesn’t work.

Cash flow is king

Back in my photo software days, many of our competitors (we had eight at one time) offered “free lifetime support”.

I refused to offer that because I knew it would either kill our business or prevent us from providing the kind of support we felt we had to offer.

Prospective customers would ask me why they should buy our stuff instead of a competitor’s when that competitor didn’t charge annually for software upgrades and support.

All I had to do was ask them: “Whose lifetime are we talking about? How free, unlimited and lifetime is that support when they go out of business because their business model doesn’t work?” Two years later, only two competitors remained.

If the math for your business model doesn’t work, nothing else matters. Once it does, the other nine things are pretty important.

Next time, we’ll get into detail about the math of your business.

photo credit: James Jordan

My wife’s birthday was this weekend, so as a last bit of her gift, our youngest son and I took her to one of her favorite restaurants in the Valley.

As we sat down and caught up on junior’s just-finished semester at Pacific, the “so, what are you gonna order” discussion starts.

My wife he has a favorite entree there – and to my knowledge has never ordered anything else in our many visits to this place over a period of roughly 5 years.

But this time, she asks for something else.

Turns out that the last time we visited, she ordered this item and the creamy sauce was more watery than creamy and just “didn’t seem like it used to”.

My son likes that dish as well, so he ordered it anyway.

Taking Pride

Most of my son’s jobs have been in the fine dining and/or catering business and the chefs he’s worked for are a couple of the finest we have to offer in our area.

His dish arrives and sure enough, he notices things that would have never flown at his employers’ restaurants.

Chipped plates, for example. His arrives with a small handful of chips around the edges of the plate. Both mine and my wife’s have them as well.

He tells us that someone with pride in their work would never serve these entrees on chipped plates (this is a restaurant with entrees from $14-29).

He also notices that the sauce is thinner than usual and not seasoned as it was in the past.

Reflecting ownership

“Something’s changed here”, he notes. “Do they have a new owner?”

I’m not sure of the timeframe but I do recall a change of ownership sometime in the past.

While that may or may not be the instigation of the change in entree quality of this place’s signature dish, it doesn’t really matter because it reflects on the owner, the manager and the head chef.

The chipped plates are a symptom of “Oh, that’s good enough”.

Would you sell your business’ reputation gets sold for the price of a $6 dinner plate? Or .08 worth of garlic, a little black pepper and 4 more minutes on the burner?

How about one less restroom check per day? Or a 25 cents worth of Pine Sol in the mop water?

It happens every day. Don’t let it happen to your business. Don’t teach “good enough” to your employees.

Every little thing sends a message. If nothing else, this is high-value marketing with a low price.

Doing it wrong gives it a high cost and delivers the wrong thing – reputation damage that’s hard to get back.

photo credit: Gonzalo Baeza Hernández

Today’s guest post is focused on the web, software operations, deployment and geeky stuff like that, BUT…

BUT…if you filter the geekspeak out of it, it applies *directly* to just about every other team / process situation, in almost every workplace.

The core message: the difference between speed of recovery from a failure and time between failures, and what that means to your team, your business culture and your work processes.

The slideshow at the end is really great stuff. Again, don’t get too focused on the geeky part, because the underlying concepts are just as valuable to you, no matter what you do.

Thanks to Fraser Speirs for making note of it (in his case, in the iPad + education context). If you’re into the impact of iPad use or technology’s impact in education, Fraser is a great one to follow on Twitter.

The subject of this post? It comes from the slideshow.

PS: The Jeep video has a number of lessons of its own. I’ll talk about that later this week.