Grow Your Business

Wasting time has always been a pet peeve of mine.  Being placed on hold with a customer service department is a great example.  I recently needed to call my local utility company and based on past experiences, I decided to make good use of the time I would be on hold. Before I placed the call I opened a document on my computer which I could work on while listening to the elevator music on my headset.

The only thing worse than others wasting my time is when I waste my own time. We’ve all heard the phrase that “time is money” so look around your office. Where are you wasting time waiting?  Perhaps you’ve grown accustomed to the wait and you don’t even recognize it anymore.  Here is a short list to get you started in identifying those wasted moments:

1. Using the “search” function to find an E-mail or a document on your computer – It is estimated that we spend 150 hours each year looking for misplaced information. That’s almost four work weeks! Take the time to properly name a document or to place an E-mail in its proper file.
2. Sluggish computer – A slow computer not only wastes time but causes frustration. Remove any programs or software that you no longer use and contact your computer geek to perform a tune-up.
3. Waiting for a return phone call or E-mail – If the response you need is an urgent one, avoid  E-mail. Instead, use the phone. Your message should specify the urgency of your need. In order to help others from wasting time waiting on you, turn on your E-mail auto responder and record a specific voicemail message any time you’ll be away for a half day or more.
4. Signatures – Sometimes the wheels of Corporate America grind ever so slowly due to a heavy layer of signatures required. Suggest a review of the signatures required in order to gain efficiency in a process and to keep projects moving forward in a timely fashion.
5. Waiting in queue for a printer or fax machine – If you’re spending a great deal of time standing around the department printer, begin documenting the time. Many companies have taken the lean approach in reducing the number of printers/faxes available to their employees. However, they may not be aware of the amount of time people are standing around waiting. Investing in a few additional pieces of equipment will make better use of their employee’s time and cut down on everyone’s frustration.

As I wrap this up, I’ll leave you with this thought: If you learned to save just 15 minutes a day, you would be saving 75 minutes each week which computes to 65 hours over the course of one year. Wow – that’s a lot!  Now who can’t use a little more time?

Audrey Thomas, CPO®, is a national speaker, author, and Lean Office expert.  She is the author of Buried Alive!: Surviving the Avalanche of Paper and E-mail and Getting Organized with MS Outlook and serves as Past-President of the National Speakers Association-Minnesota. A frequent speaker at conferences and sales meetings, Audrey also coaches individuals who want to improve their productivity and get more done in their day. Contact her at Audrey@OrganizedAudrey.com 1-866-767-0455 or visit www.OrganizedAudrey.com

Have you ever watched a movie or listened to a speaker at a conference that put you to sleep? You just get numb from the uninspiring information and delivery. A bad economy will do the same thing to your business. After 18 months of recession slow down and back-stepping, business leaders can get into a malaise that feels like the numbness experienced listening to that boring speaker.

Once this habitual plodding happens, business leaders miss good opportunities because their minds are more focused on just getting through one more month instead of looking for big jump opportunities.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Is your budget for this year set with expectation of improvement or with the fear of repeating 2009?
• Do you have wiggle room to capitalize on a fresh opportunity or do you feel overwhelmed in time and financial resources; therefore, you only hope to make it through the year?
• Are you on high energy rush and expecting to have a record performance year, or are you using the same mindset you used to survive 2008 and 2009?

Opportunities for every business will be available this year. Those leaders who are looking for them will find a way to take those opportunities and turn them into long-term success. Others will be waiting on the right time to take on such new ideas, which means those business executives will go lacking while the aggressors take more market share.

Use this month to awaken your senses, get your people vibrant in their attitudes once again and grab your share of opportunities that are ripe with potential. In talking with a gentleman who owns 600 rental properties, someone asked him if he was feeling the pinch of the economy where people were not paying or he was left with open properties. He didn’t even respond to the question, he just offered a different perspective.

He said, “I’m not worried about how many open properties I have because now is the time to focus on the great opportunity to buy more properties, so I’ve been on a buying spree getting some great deals.”

Think of your perspective. Are you more focused on the negative impact the economy has had on your business, or are you focusing on the opportunities that can be grabbed while everyone is looking the other way? This is your wake up call.

Chip Conley, the CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, shared his internal struggle with posting his Burning Man pictures on his Facebook page at http://bit.ly/2qIml5 His pr advisors told him those pictures and his CEO persona could cause a misunderstanding about what is proper behavior. (I think it was his tutu picture that was the point of the discussion.)

Burning man is a one week retreat in the middle of a dust bowl with no food, no water, no showers, no cars, just what you carry in on your back or bike. It is intended to be an “out there” experience and from what people who have attended told me, you will see anything and everything going on at this retreat. When I say everything, suffice it to say, it is impossible not to be shocked at Burning Man because it attracts the freest of the free spirits and the edge is pushed more and more each year. I would guess not many CEOs attend Burning Man.

Which brings the question for all executives: What is proper to share on social media? The challenge with social media is that your personal and professional lives collide and for the “In the full disclosure of who I am” category it is actually a great resource for people to investigate who you are. Everything about who you are.

Employers are looking at social media pages such as facebook, twitter, and linkedin to see what employees and prospective employees are saying. The same goes for executives who are being “checked out” by employees, clients and competitors.

I have a number of clients who follow me on my personal pages as well as my fan page www.facebook.com/russelljwhite2 and they get the full me. But where is the Too Much Information (TMI) line drawn?

Would I share about my Saturday night in the strip club where I got 5 lap dances, had 8 beers, and was escorted out of the club by the bouncer for rude behavior? Would I share my disappointment about my employees letting me down? Would I go on a rant about how I hate Mondays?

Curiously, I have read each of these remarks by people who at that moment were employed somewhere. Is there a different standard for executives? I don’t think so.

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In other words: How to prevent the competition from telling everyone about your weakness.

The Verizon map ads seem to appear on TV every 10 minutes. Their unrelenting message caused AT&T to fight back with Luke Wilson ads that just don’t work. Why? Because Verizon found the glaring weakness of their competitor and cleverly got the word out to potential customers while the AT&T ads are just attacks on a competitor. Sour grapes does not gain market share.

What is AT&T going to do about this?

AT&T Will Spend $2 Billion To Improve Wireless Network http://bit.ly/d8db63

Now they are making upgrades they should’ve done before. Instead of gaining momentum with upgrades it appears they got caught with their pants down and appear to be reacting to the competitor’s ads. Meaning, instead of gaining customers for the upgrades they appear to be simply trying to keep the customers they have. That is a dramatically different return for a $2 billion investment.

How could they have prevented this from happening?

1. Be honest with yourself about shortfalls

When I work with organizations on strategic planning we often discuss the problems they have in-house and problems the competitors have. Which list do you imagine is longer? Many executives are blind to their own in-house problems and seem more focused on justifying why their situation is like it is.

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I had a message on my desk the plant manager wanted to see me. As a newly promoted fresh-faced department head I hadn’t been jaded to the fact I was wanted in the plant manager’s office. To my eagerness this was an opportunity for face time. To shine. To please my boss.

He asks me to close the door and have a seat. The tone was stern and unemotional. His first question to me was, “Russell do you want to be a success in this business?” Of course! There was never a doubt. How could he question this? I answered immediately, “I’ll do what ever it takes to be the best manager I can be.” He smiled, sat forward in his seat and said, “I knew you’d see it my way.”

He continued, “The first thing you need to do is get rid of the boots.  (There were plain black not the red ones) I don’t care how polished you keep them and how nice they are, they’ll always be sh*tkickers in my book and no one in management in this company wears those things to work. Second, you have a personalized license tag on your car and Read more »

Back in the dark ages I owned record albums with “hidden” soundtracks and “backmasking.” Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief album had a second, or “hidden,” groove on one side of the album that only played if the stylus hit it accidentally. We called this the “third side” of the album.

The Beatles White album has a message recorded backwards under the song Revolution Number 9. I had access to a radio studio turntable, so I could play the album backwards and hear what the words really said. These were the surprise prizes that were shared from person to person; the “inside” information made us feel in the know, clever for having figured it out, and part of a special crowd.

DVDs now do the same thing with Easter Eggs. They are exciting to discover, and the customer feels special and rewarded. And the best part for the customer — sharing the “secret” with someone else! For example, the Cars DVD has hidden treasures aficionados enjoy. If you’ve seen “Boundin’ with Mater,” you are an Insider!

Even TV shows. The little icons prior to commercials on Fringe spell words in code.

What are you doing to create the buzz of word of mouth marketing for your surprise prizes?

Do you know about the “secret menu” at In and Out Burger? Have it “Animal Style!” Are you a Maker’s Mark Ambassador with your own barrel of private stock bourbon? Now you want to be an Insider don’t you?

Define the “Insider” Read more »

Lately I’ve been listening to people who are always upbeat and excited about life and their optimism is great but it’s missing something. “Sure the economy will turn around.” “I have my health.” “There are a lot of people a lot worse off than me, so I have nothing to complain about.” Some of the optimism seems Pollyanna to me and wishing and hoping optimistically isn’t enough! You need to be opportunistic!

When I bought this house I live in on the lake I was looking for not just a nice house but a good deal and great investment opportunity. That fact that we found a house underpriced because of an acrimonious divorce just wanting to get rid of the last connection they had was my good fortune! Had we not signed the papers the day we did the opportunity would’ve been lost because literally there was a couple flying across the country from Seattle to come put a contract on it. They were in the air when we inked the deal! Oh yea! That’s opportunistic!

Those reading this can scoff but winners take control and grab opportunity when it presents itself. I got to watch the Panthers beat the Packers at Lambeau Field because I grabbed opportunity. I got to see a Styx concert in Vegas for free because I grabbed opportunity. I met my breakeven figure for the year before the year started because I grabbed opportunity.

Opportunistic seems to have a negative connotation to it, I figure that’s because there are more people who miss out on opportunities than those who grab it. Be the one to grab opportunity and elevate your optimism to opportunism.

Do you know where to focus your growth efforts?  Do you know what your break-even point is?  Do you know how your numbers compare to your peers – and not just your revenue numbers?

These are questions that I work on daily with small business owners.  Most business owner’s think in terms of one line item when they try to grow their business – revenue.  This is logical choice.  After all, if revenue is higher, you must be making more money, right?  Wrong.  While this may be the case in a perfect world, it often leads to business owners struggling for years to make ends meet when the mathematics of the business just do not work.  What can be done to fix the problem?  It’s simple.  We just have to change the number so that the math works.

We recently helped a client who had been consistently loosing money for seven years – at a rate over of about $175,000 per year.   When talking with the client, his solution was that he needed more sales.  If he could just get more sales, he would be profitable.    We sat down with him and did a thorough break-even analysis.  Using his current cost structures, it was going to take nearly $3 million in sales for him to breakeven.  He was currently sitting at $700,000.   The answer to his problem was not sales, it was his cost structure. Read more »

When I speak at conventions and conferences in breakout sessions, one of my main goals is to shut down one other concurrent session. I want to have such a large audience eager to hear my information that I have standing room only and one other speaker has an audience of 3 or less. It works regularly and I’m proud of it.

Does this sound cruel to you? Does this sound like I have my priorities all askew? I am in a competitive world just as you are and everyone should be looking for ways to make your business such a draw it cripples your competitor.

I learned this years ago when I was working a cable television trade show and part of my compensation was to have a booth. It just so happens my booth was in between HGTV and the Playboy channel. Because of my antics in the booth, the games I was running and the prizes I was giving away created an excitement that drew a critical mass of people. Once there was the critical mass, people started to noticed and wondered what they were missing and the crowd grew even more. In fact for that show I out drew both of my neighbors purely because I created the right excitement and enthusiasm and had a plan to draw a crowd. Isn’t that the purpose of a trade show? It’s the same purpose for your business.

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I had the opportunity to meet with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to pitch a project I wanted to do for them. In his spacious office John Wayne was everywhere: posters, autographed pictures, and even a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Duke himself standing in one corner of the office.

I commented on the memorabilia and he mentioned to me everyone who comes to his office wants to add to his collection, and the way he said it, I got the feeling his interest became more the passion of others with their gifts.

As I was leaving after my presentation I noticed one thing framed that had nothing to do with John Wayne. It was a certificate from Star Fleet Command. He was a closet Trekkie! When I asked about that particular framed certificate his eyes lit up and he told me all about his week at Star Trek camp! You never know do you?

In the thank you note to him for giving me his time I included two inexpensive items I found on ebay. One was a Star Trek communicator the actors would hit on their chest to communicate with others on board. The second was a red enamel Klingon war pin.

In the note I told him he could use these as indicators when he walked into meetings. If the communicator pin was on it was open communication. If he was wearing the Klingon war pin – the warrior was loose.

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