photo credit: Vincent Luigi Molino

A couple of days ago, I was pretty forward with you guys about your responsibilities as both employees and employers.

It’s easy to assume that one will regularly take advantage of the other – even in the current tight job market. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s been going on forever so my guess is that it’ll continue.

Even the current education reform arguments are full of us vs. them employee/employer tension and rhetoric. You, of course, can put an end to it if you like.

The current employment/economy situation in general reminds me of a story General Schwartzkopf tells about the First Gulf War.

Quoting Schwartzkopf:

“…You can look at the number of tanks, you can look at the number of airplanes, you can look at all these factors of military might and put them together. But unless the soldier on the ground, or the airman in the air, has the will to win and the strength of character to go into battle, believes his cause is just, and has the support of his country, all the rest of that stuff is irrelevant.”

Employers face an identical issue, as did the commander of the once-feared Iraqi Republican Guard.

You can buy the best tools, have the best location, the best products and services, provide what you think is the best value, BUT as the General says: “…all that stuff is irrelevant.”

You’d better also have the best staff. Best trained, best attitude and so on.

That goes for you too, since being the best in your market includes all those things, as well as paying a decent wage, continually training the people you have and providing the tools they need to succeed – and not looking at them with that “Hey, the job market stinks so I can pay you less, replace you in a heartbeat, work you more and treat you not quite as nice as I usually might” kind of attitude.

Because as Schwartzkopf says…the soldier on the ground might be the best and have the best to work with, but they can make your business irrelevant.

They’re on the front lines every day. They’re the ones answering the phones and greeting your customers. They’re the ones you expect to smile whether you’re standing there or not.

That teenager working her first job deserves at least as much consideration, training and attention as an employee as the “best” full-timer you have because she can run off your best customer in a heartbeat.

How’s that training expense seem now? Tiny, I’ll bet.

Treat your people like your most valuable investment – because that’s exactly what they are.

Employees have a similar burden

Sure, the job market is tight so you obviously want to deliver as much value as you can – that much is obvious.

Little things make a big difference.

Do you show up on time? If something happens and you’re going to be late, do you call? Do you arrive ready to kick some butt? Do you show up looking the part? Nails clean? Yeah, little stuff like that.

You might think that owner of yours is a rotten old cuss who is getting rich off your back. While that might be true (and I’ve suggested you create your own economy via your own small business as a way to cure yourself of that problem), it’s also true that the rotten old cuss has and continues to take risks and invest their money to create and sustain the business that pays you.

If you make $30k and have just 3 fellow employees, consider what has to happen for your checks to clear each week. At the very least, they’ve got to take in at least $3000 a week just to make your checks clear (and set aside money for their part of payroll taxes).

Zig Ziglar once said that you should consider yourself self-employed whether you have a job or not. Do the job as if you owned the place, because it reflects on you.

You never know if that customer in front of you will someday be your boss, or better – your best customer (of your own business) or even the one who suggests to the person who owns your business that they’d be nuts not to promote you and give you a raise because of the amazing job you did for them.

You’re the one who makes your boss’ business more competitive on the ground level – and that’s what makes sure it’s there to pay you tomorrow.

photo credit: matticgn

Yesterday, we talked about David Lee Roth’s M&Ms trick and how it acted somewhat like a canary in the coal mine.

It probably looked like a silly “diva clause” to everyone but Roth. A little, unimportant detail.

These little details that your competitors ignore or see as unimportant might be the one thing that customers view as an indicator of additional, more serious problems.

They’ll stick out even more when you take care of them, as if you pointed a laser beam at the very things they never wanted anyone to notice.

Don’t let those little things undermine your customer relationships. Use them.

Yesterday’s Eagle Court reminded me of the last few moments of this short 2 minute video guest post from Tom Peters.

Note for those who might cringe at, be disgusted by or even “hate” the thought of a company earning the “obscene profits” extols: Mr Peters is a Democrat who spoke on the Obama campaign trail in 2008.

Can you imagine watching the heads of 2 political parties would have discussing that? Irony is beautiful sometimes.

My amusement aside, I urge you to take the video deadly serious: Get rid of the “average” stuff/processes/people in your business (or improve them).

Do it with enthusiasm and without prejudice.

photo credit: maessive

Today is about setting expectations.

When you go into a doctor’s office, most people figure they’ll wait 10-15 minutes whether it makes any sense or not.

If that doctor’s office happens to be an OBGYN, you can reasonably expect that it might be 10 minutes or 3 hours, which goes with the OB part of the territory.

The leg, again

So yesterday, I went back to the doc to get that spider bite thing looked at (again, I’ll spare you the photos). After waiting 10-15 minutes to get the standard temp/bp and probing questions, I somehow managed to find a way to wait for 30 minutes before seeing a doc.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had to poke my head out and ask where ye old doc was.

Why, he’s right outside my door, finishing up some paperwork from the prior client. He looks up, smiles and says “Sorry, had a little crisis, but I’ll be in to see you in just a moment.”

Had Blood Pressure Boy (sorry, don’t recall his name) stuck his head in the door and said “hey, we’ve got a little crisis down the hall, it might be 20-30 minutes before the doc can see you”, expectations are set and reasonably so. I’d sit there and watch “History of the electric light bulb” on the History Channel and be all mellow and such.

Silence, on the other hand, just has me sitting there stewing as I stare at a swollen, red leg wondering if everyone went out for happy hour or over to Costco to taste a few samples.

15 seconds: the time it would have taken for someone to poke their head in and set expectations.

Power to the people

Over the weekend, we had a bunch of wind push over a tree onto the power poles just down the road. 1 pole got creamed, which put tension on the one in front of my drive. It ended up badly cracked. 6 hours without power.

When telephone poles get creamed by falling trees on my road, I expect the power to go out…just not randomly for 3 to 6 hours each day for 4 days.

Yesterday, I walked out to see if they were going to change both poles that day (not sure) and they volunteered that the power would be out for several hours in the afternoon. That allowed me to schedule around the power situation without a loss of time, productivity and so on.

Today, they showed up again. One of the trucks is parked on the road in front of my place.

It might have taken 2 minutes to walk down the drive, knock on the door and say “hey, we’re taking the power down in about 10 minutes and it’ll be down for several hours”.

But that didn’t happen.

Mid-morning, the power went out without warning.

Now, I knew that it was going to go out sometime during the day,  but not when. The effort to share that tidbit would have saved me no time (due to short-term UPS batteries protecting my gear), but it would have let me prepare my schedule around it.

The slight edge, again

It’s not a huge deal, but it’s one of those slight edge things that great businesses do for their customers.

• “Hey, we’ve got a crisis in room 11. It might be 30 minutes before the doc can see you. Would you like a cup of water or something?”
• “Hey, we’re cutting the power in 10 minutes and it’ll be down for several hours, just a heads up in case you need to shut down computers or something.”
• “Hey, it’ll be 2 weeks before I can get to your mower, will you need it before then? If so, stop by and I’ll give you a loaner.”
• “Hey, there’s a rebate on that item, better take this form with you. May as well save a few bucks where you can.”
• “Did you know that our clients who sell this item sell 20% more if they present it this way? Might give it a try if you can.”

You get the idea.

Expectations can change in a mere 15 seconds. So can your entire relationship with a client.

photo credit: Jesslee Cuizon

Everyone just loves performance evaluations.

Employees tend to dread them because they’re often a useless exercise of “well, you’re doing ok, here’s your 2% raise, see you in 6 months or a year or whatever”.

Sometimes you’ll hear that you need to improve something, but more often than not you’ll hear nothing specific that you can really bear down on. Back to the treadmill you go, cubicle boy.

While there are exceptions in high-quality (and sometimes, high-pressure) organizations, salespeople with easy-to-measure performance metrics (deals, revenue, etc) often get little in the way of feedback other than a Zig Ziglar book tossed in their direction.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing and it’ll likely help – but it isn’t detailed, high-quality feedback that helps you improve your performance. Quotas aren’t feedback and neither is a serving of Zig, no matter how tasty a morsel of brain food it might be.

Self-employed folks like me get evaluations in a slightly different way: in the form of testimonials or by not having our calls returned, or by something somewhere in between. Not unlike an employee performance review – you almost always know why and to expect what you got.

Don’t be the majority

The majority of folks just don’t get a lot of guidance on what they need to do and specifically how to get there.

Some companies are better at this than others, but most just don’t seem to focus on it. Big mistake, because without specifics, you don’t know much.

You don’t know for sure who the best is, unless you consult your “Seat of the pants” meter – and we all know how accurate that is.

You might think you know because Joe talks about what he does more than Mary or Jerry, but it might turn out that Stefan (who you never see) is really the one putting out the programming that has the fewest bugs, the pottery that has lowest return rate, the timber framing that requires the least amount of shim, the websites that produce the best sales, the brochures that generate the most calls, or whatever.

All of these things are measurable.

If your business isn’t one of the ones I mentioned, there’s something that your employees do that can be measured – and thus, managed (yes, a Druckerism).

You already know what to measure. But you might not be doing it, and you likely aren’t doing it by employee, much less breaking it down by time of day, days since the last day off, days since first leaving for a sick day and so on.

Real world

Let’s make it a little bit harder by making the job a little bit harder to measure.

Imagine that you’re trying to do this measurement at an architecture firm. There’s a lot of highly-subjective work going on there. Seems like it would be hard to measure.

Who makes the best designs? And what does “best” really mean?

Sells the best? Uses the least amount of resources? Burns the least energy when compared to similarly purposed structures?

You have to decide what “best” is because until you do, best is a gut feel.

That’s a terrible way to assess performance, particularly of complex tasks like architecture, engineering and programming, but it isn’t any more attractive for less-complex roles.

Knowing your staff. REALLY knowing them

Without performance measurement of this nature, you might not have an idea who is more productive with high quality work when single family homes vs. commercial structures.

You might not know who does crappy work when they take 1 sick day and hits their normal quality level when they take 2 days. If they happen to perform critical path, possibly life-threatening work on that second day, wouldn’t you want to know?

The really cool thing is that it can completely alter your company’s future by vastly improving the one thing that lots of folks mess up, or at least, don’t do a very good job of.

Hiring.

Every manager has a bad hire story, maybe two.

Trouble is, that’s the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. Avoiding that hire or giving HR and management more tools to make a better hire are what you really need.

Measurement to the rescue.

Aych Arr

Using this same measurement data, your hiring can change – if you want it to.

For example, instead of hiring someone who knows how to competently design 437 different structures (in generic terms, a civil or mechanical engineer), you may just need to find the master of all composite wood beam designs because that’s the weak spot on your team.

You know this because… your measurement data says so.

Even if your composite wood beam expert just retired, you can still look at your measurement data to see which parts of their job should be given to existing staff and what specialties across the entire staff are your company’s weakness.

Either way, you hire for strength in the skills your data indicate – remember, the data illustrates what your existing staff do best.

IT managers and software execs: Imagine if your favorite programming environment could do this. What could you get from a tool that measured development at this level of granularity?

What if you knew who performs task A faster than everyone else, but stinks at performing task B, but you never really figure this out because each person does their own project from beginning to end.

Get to the point, will ya?

You have all this data. As a result, you have better people who are creating better work. If you bid jobs, your performance data will help you produce better bids (we talked about that last week).

And why exactly aren’t you measuring performance?

One of the places where you don’t see a lot of creativity in is guarantees. Yet they are one of the least expensive ways to market your products and service.

In a world where it sometimes seems that there are only two guarantees (that death and taxes thing), it’s a great way to stand way out in front of the dont-get-its in your market.

A guarantee serves one purpose to the client: it eliminates the risk that holds a buyer back just before they purchase. The expense of providing an incredible guarantee is extremely cost effective. Yeah, cheap.

Why? Because a small minority of people will use them – and more importantly, if you are really doing your job – they’ll rarely be used.

Your goal: To perform so consistently that your guarantee rarely gets used.

Not getting used is the real focus of a guarantee, but you may not be thinking of the reason why: it’s a great motivator to get your business to reach the levels of performance that you want to attain.

No good customer really wants to use your guarantee. It simply serves to protect them in case your service and products don’t match what you promised. 

So here are 3 guarantee ideas to use as seeds for your new guarantee:

Guarantee #1: For big ticket items (a fridge, furniture, and similar), guarantee that delivery will be on time, within a 1 hour window, or their delivery is free (assuming it isn’t already) plus you’ll buy the customer dinner for 2 at a nice local restaurant as an apology.

Result: Forces you to organize and streamline your delivery scheduling and execution. Tells the customer that they aren’t going to get that “sometime between 8 am and 5 pm on Tuesday” delivery promise.

How you turn it into more than a guarantee: Talk the local restaurant into co-oping the dinner expense. They want customers. They can get 2 dinner customers one time, split the cost of the dinner with you, and if they do things right – they have customers for life. You save a little money, the restaurant gets 2 new customers. Win-win.

Guarantee #2: The big audacious one year money back guarantee on something that no one else guarantees for a year. Yeah, I know. That little guy sitting on the left shoulder. He says they’ll never return it in a year, so what’s the point.

The point is that they can return it for a year, not that they will. It doesn’t matter that 98% of those asking for a refund will do so within 30 days. 

Result: More sales due to less risk. This guarantee is particularly effective on products and services that are normally guaranteed for 30 days but might see the bulk of their return for 60. If you raise yours to 60 days, your competitor would probably follow suit. If you raise it to a year, they’ll think you’re nuts and they’ll never realize what happened

Guarantee #3: Guarantee the intangible thing that no one else will: Peace of mind. “If you don’t feel that our product has made your family/life/business more comfortable, more pleasant, more successful and less hassle-filled, we want it back.” Your wording will probably need to be different than that, but that should  get the idea across.

Result: Forces you to remember what you are really selling. You aren’t selling a will or estate planning, you’re selling peace of mind, knowing your clients’ kids will be . You aren’t selling tax preparation services, you’re selling peace of mind, knowing that the IRS isn’t going to catch you goofing up your return because a real pro prepared it. Remember Michelin and the baby. They aren’t selling tires. They’re selling safety for that family and their baby. The sooner you remember that, the better off your business will be.

I’m curious to hear from you about this: What’s the best guarantee you’ve seen? Why did it motivate you to trust and buy from whoever offered it?