Up Your (Business) Game

We all want our businesses to be the best in our chosen Niche. However, when we work in a small business, or alone, it can be difficult to find tools and techniques that enable us to consistently improve our performance.

10 top tips to inspire

• Attitude - Always foster an attitude of greatness in your own performance and in those you work with: Suppliers; Customers; Peers; Colleagues
• Avoid Mediocrity - Good enough – is the enemy of great – resist the temptation to lower your quality standards – even for the lowest paying customers. If necessary, sack customers who pull your performance down.
• Belief - Believe in yourself and in your own ability.When you start to doubt yourself, speak to a trusted advisor, family member or mentor – or pick a task from your to-do-list that will make you feel better about talents.
• Enemies - War drives innovation – as does any major struggle. Choose a worthy enemy to compete against or to bench-mark your performance. It may be a business you actively compete against, or you could choose a business like your own in another town to measure your business against.
• Colleagues and Associates - It is often said that our own income is the average of the people we associate with. Find people who make you stretch your business performance. Choose networks for the talented people represented as well as for the business opportunities. Forge alliances with people who are better than you in some business aspects – you will probably excel in an area that they find difficult.
• Defy Convention - Conventional wisdom is often wrong – base decisions on facts and data. Avoid “gang mentality” approaches to business – they are often based on prejudice and fear – rather than on evidence.
• Inspire Others - Spend at least part of every week inspiring others in some way. Your own confidence and attitude will benefit from your generous actions.
• Technique - Practice – school yourself on key techniques. Measure your performance. Act on your measurement to improve your ability to work in each of your specialisms.
• Training - Get training on any techniques that you struggle with. Olympic athletes have lessons to improve their technique – there is no justifiable reason for assuming that you know so much about a topic that you will not benefit from some well thought out training and skills development.
• Youth - People who are straight out of school, college or university can have a better grasp of professional areas that we are too arrogant to revise. Take advantage of their enthusiasm and learn the things you have forgotten as well as the more modern techniques developed since you trained.
  

Good luck with upping your business game.

Doing Things Right vs Doing The Right Things

In business, it is easy to get lulled into a world of efficiency – where all the energy in the business is devoted to doing things right. When this happens, effectiveness suffers – because no / limited energy is devoted to doing the right things.

What is required is a balance.

• Sufficient time devoted to doing things right – being efficient

Plus

• Sufficient time devoted to doing the right things – being effective

Management is doing things right;
Leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker

Examples

Doing Things Right

• Improve quotation turn-round time/ reduce quotation back-log
• Chasing cash in the most effective manner
• Improve networking follow up process
• Dealing with today’s emergencies as a matter of urgency (Urgent and Important – fixed - Check)
• Maximising the efficiency of a manual, outdated process

Doing The Right Things

• Target the right people with the right offer to maximise conversion rates of the most profitable business
• Understanding all the obstacles to cash collection and changing business practices to ensure maximum customer delight and minimum obstacles to on time payment
• Creating offers based on regular payments by standing order
• Attend the right networking meetings for the right reasons and network deeply
• Working on the Important but not urgent issues in the business to minimise the number of emergencies in the business
• Automating processes where it makes sense
• Streamlining the business to remove / change processes that add no value to the business or the customer.

When to think about this:

• Planning to-do lists
• Strategic planning
• Budget time
• Setting out the plan for the week
• When fixing problems in the business
• Team meetings
• Business planning sessions
• Board meetings
• Setting up the business review process

Presentation Sins - Top 10

Over the last three weeks, I have had the misfortune to sit through a lot of PowerPoint. The best presentations were interesting, just the right length, taught me something I did not know before and kept my attention throughout.

The worst - well they included one or more of the following sins (in no particular order):

1. "Sorry, this is not my presentation" - no excuse for this one - just too hurried or too lazy to learn the material behind the slides. You are in front of an audience because you are expected to know more about the subject than the audience. If you abuse that trust by not knowing your material, everybody gets to waste their time.
2. "These figures are taken from the annual report which is out of date" - or some other excuse for not updating the data you are using. Your audience will expect you to have the best available information - or to extrapolate to today depending on the circumstances. Lazy presenters are guilty of this error - frequently.
3. "Here are a couple of case studies. I am not familiar with them so I will read the script." - another way of telling your audience that you could not give them the courtesy of preparing properly.
4. "These slides are from a colleague, so please do not ask me any questions." - so why did you include the slides that you could not be bothered to research?
5. Blue fonts on a blue background - It may look OK on your whizz-bang laptop, but projection systems are often lower in contrast. Help your audience by making things legible.
6. 4 point font - You just had to include all the text. Then you read it to the audience who cannot read it for themselves. In a short presentation, there is a limit to the amount of information that an audience can absorb. Unless you have a great reason, try the rule of 6. Maximum 6 bullets per slide. Maximum 6 words per bullet.
7. Not rehearsed - often made obvious by a failure to stick to time, repetition of similar points, lack of flow or a hesitant delivery. Your audience trusted you to be the authority. You could give up an hour of your time to rehearse.
8. Technology fumbles - pressing the wrong button or that clever video fails to run. In all presentations, arrive early, check the technology - especially if you are using somebody else's systems. And keep the embedded techie features to a minimum. If it does not add value to the audience, leave it out. You are there to engage the audience with your content, not with your grasp of weird PowerPoint features.
9. Ignoring the audience - or failing to do your homework before the event. Try asking the organiser about the audience if you do not know them. When you get in the room, you could try asking questions of the audience to see what they already know of your subject, then you get the chance to vary the level at which you deliver the content - assuming that you spent enough time preparing properly.
10. Over-running - your host invited you to speak for a specific amount of time. And you agreed to speak for 20, 30, 50, 70 minutes. That means planning the content properly to cover the material in the planned amount of time. If you are the only thing between the audience and the loos, coffee or 'phone messages, how much of your content do you think they will remember?

So, how many of the sad 10 are you guilty of? There is a huge amount of content on the web about preparing for presentations. If you struggle to get the basics right, then it will pay you to spend a day of your life getting some training. One day, you might win some business from an audience that you pleased rather than boring senseless!

I Am The Problem

7 symptoms your business may be aware of - but has not got around to letting you in on the secret.

1. Micromanagement
You have stopped trusting the team. You are spending so much time micro-managing details that:

• Your team now resent your continuous interference, And:
• You have stopped working on the business improvement projects that only you can deliver.

2. Knee Jerk Changes to the Offer
Sales slump and you are making changes to your firm's offer without pausing to speak to:

• Customers (new, existing, lapsed) or to

• People who enquire but do not buy.

3. Cost Focus
Instead of assessing value and returns on spend, your focus is on cutting costs - regardless of the implications. Typical areas to explore are:

• Advertising spend vs Lead generation
• Staff down-time vs Staff training

4. Sales Failures
Your obsession with detailed problems and issues has caused the entire firm to lose confidence - which leads in turn to further sales losses as prospects fail to be enthused by meetings, telephone calls or emails that feel negative.

5. Marketing Fairground
You sample every shiny new marketing gimmick - but without thought and without considering how long it might take to make a real difference. You are jumping on each initiative that is appealing but failing to be consistent in anything.

6. No Customer Insight
Your prospect understanding is either non-existent or was compiled in a different economic environment.

7. Fad Focus
Business improvement has declined to the point where you have engaged every freelance you know to work on their specialism in your business - for just long enough to not quite deliver any improvement:

• Teamwork
• Coaching
• Board mentoring

How many of the sad 7 are you guilty of?
1-2 - It is not too late - you need to start working on your business instead of in it.
3-5 - You need help - and you need to find support that you will engage for at least 3 months whilst you stabilise the business
6-7 - It may be too late, but you need to act now to ensure that you start the recovery process before the financial symptoms start to dominate your thinking.

The Perils of Hype

In the early part of the 20th Century, a new technology was struggling to become established. A plethora of new manufacturers, some operating on a shoestring, were clamouring for public attention. Overall adoption of the new technology was modest. This modest adoption rate arose because, whilst the target market was often convinced of the merits, the whole product was not fully developed to the point where it became a practical proposition for people of modest means. Vehicles were often expensive, servicing was troublesome, fuel availability was patchy. And the early cars frightened the horses.

The new technology was the Motor Car. There were lots of examples of extravagant claims and marketing hype for motor cars in the first 20-25 years of the 20th Century. However, many manufacturers adopted a more robust approach to publicity. Their process was:

• Find a challenge (usually a sporting event)
• Complete the challenge
• Promote the results

It still took an enormous change in the mechanical aptitude of the average consumer (soldiers returning from WW1 able to drive and to conduct basic maintenance procedures) before the masses became mobile.

The 21st Century approach to the marketing of new technologies seems to be:

• Find a band-waggon
• Create tenuous connections from my product to that band-waggon
• Confuse the market by claiming membership of a hype trend

Net Result
Target customers become confused, and analysts get frustrated. Products which were previously being promoted as the best possible exponent of the previous band-waggon are mysteriously upgraded (sometimes with minimal changes) to become fully hyped members of the new hype trend.

Marketing Caution

• Make sure that your marketing messages are based on substance
• Use style to embellish if you must - but never at the expense of hiding elderly substance under a cloud of hype
• Avoid being suckered into joining the next hype trend with last year's products
• Listen to customers and analysts to be sure that you are not over-communicating the hype solely because that is what your competitors are doing