Grow Your Business

I’ve noticed between this economy, new game apps on iPhones and the exciting distraction of the impending Spring weather people are getting less done and further behind. Make today Take Action Thursday!

Here is a short list of 10 actions to take today to hit your business with an energy shot to propel it forward with a burst.

1. Take action on something that has been sitting on your desk all week. Make it happen!
2. You know that crap that is piling up on your desk? File it, delegate it or throw it away.
3. Write one Job Well Done (JWD) note to an employee and mail the handwritten note to their home address. You will make their week next week, I promise.
4. Set one Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) to get done by the end of this quarter. I mean BIG!
5. Call your buddies and plan a cookout for Saturday night and party like there is no tomorrow.
6. Now you have a party to look forward to. Get your ass back to work and focus — HARD!
7. Pick one employee to energize. Ask them insightful questions about their career and show you care, and want to help them succeed.
8. Forget a heavy lunch today. Take a brisk walk for an hour then eat an apple with peanut butter at your desk.
9. Notice you missed your post-lunch coma? Great! Be more productive than you thought possible on a Friday afternoon.
10. Call a customer or client just to wish them a great weekend and let them know how pumped you are about your job.

Why do they call it March Madness? Did you watch the amazing basketball games this weekend? There were more amazing upsets that hats in church on Easter. These upsets once again prove that the experts don’t always know what they are talking about and no matter the odds; the little guys can beat the big guys at their own game.

It doesn’t just have to happen on the basketball court.

The little guys can’t out-spend or out-locate the larger competitors, so how can you act like the basketball teams winning the upsets?

Have the confidence to your core that you can win

Never has an overwhelmed team won a game when their pre-game thought of – we are going to get smashed. They all came out with the attitude of proving the experts wrong and giving it their best performance.

Look around, are your team members giving it their best performance? Are they bought-in to the concept of winning against the odds? Are they acting like deep down they have something to prove?

Deliver a great performance

Many top organizations are like many highly ranked basketball teams: They have so much talent they can overcome a periodic bad performance. In business I see large companies make money in spite of themselves, purely by volume and size.

The little guys know they don’t have that room to be sloppy. To win you have to be delivering a top performance and hope to catch the favored team in a low performance day. That combination is how big upsets happen (right Kansas?)

There is nothing you can do about when you catch the other guys sleeping, the only think you can control is delivery your great performance to give yourself a chance.

Focus on the little things.

In college basketball it is well known that defense and free throws win important games. Neither is going to show up on a highlight reel of spectacular dunks but to put a basketball spin on a golf saying; you dunk for show and defend for dough. The little guys do the little things well when they win the big games.

Small business owners, use the March Madness upsets as the inspiration for how to bring down the big competitors and create your own upsets. It’s time for some March Madness worth cheering about in our economy as well.

During the space race of the sixties NASA needed a pen that would write in zero-gravity so their astronauts could take notes and keep records while in space. Since pen technology is based on a gravity feed of ink to the point, NASA spent a million dollars (in 1960′s dollars) to design a pen that would work in zero-gravity. What did the cosmonauts use in space? A pencil.

Sometimes I see businesses overcomplicate simple matters and spend hours in meetings agonizing over issues because they are usually focusing on the wrong question. The question wasn’t what pen can write in zero-gravity, the question was how can an astronaut write in space?

What are the questions your leadership team is spending hours of meeting time on, that might be the wrong question?

Are you agonizing and focusing on how and where to trim expenses and labor or are you looking for innovative ways to find more sales to keep you from having to make those layoffs?

Are you asking questions like, “Why did this happen and who is responsible?” Or are you asking, “How can we solve this problem and prevent it from happening again?”

Look at the issues you are facing and trying to address. Which ones are you overcomplicating? You probably can save your organization thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours by doing this one thing today.

Ever had a meeting to talk about the meetings coming up? Or how about the pre-meeting meeting and the post-meeting meeting? You know they happen in every office. Imagine if you had a money counter like you see at the top of progressive slot machines sitting on your conference table counting all the salary dollars of those attending being spent/wasted in the meeting?

How can you stop wasting time and money in meetings? Try these three ideas I’ve learned from three very different CEO perspectives.

Traditional

Set an agenda and distribute days in advance. This will inform everyone of the expectations of the information to be prepared to discuss in the meeting. An agenda also established the length of time to be spent and on which topics.

Edgy

Jeff Bezos founder of amazon.com believes meetings get too cumbersome when they have too many people in them and those meetings drag on for hours and hours. Being someone who loves efficiency and doing things a bit different, Jeff believes a meeting should never be larger than who you can feed with two pizzas.

If you can feed the meeting with two pizzas he believes it’s the right number of people to truly make it an effective meeting where real decisions can be made.

Out There

Caterina Fake, co-founder of the photo-sharing site Flickr has taken my stand up meeting idea one step further. I’ve long been a proponent of meetings without chairs where every stands the entire time. Meetings are shorter, to the point and the fact everyone is standing says to everyone present, “We are busy and have other things to do so let’s get this done quickly.” Traditionally, comfy chairs, coffee pots and snacks just say, “Let’s settle in for a long time.”

Caterina adds the addition of everyone guzzling a 16 ounce bottle of water as the meeting begins and when the first person has to go to the rest room, the meeting is over. Once again a sense of urgency is added. Obviously Caterina understanding another concept I’ve mentioned – The call of nature has no call waiting.

Lance Armstrong is a winner, no doubting that. Warren Buffet is an investment success story without question. Steve Jobs has successfully created businesses that achieve greatness. Was it just luck these individuals perform at the highest levels of their chosen professions? Was it a special mental gift they possess no one else has?

There is no doubting these three successful men have special talents that helped them to succeed, but the one common trait I see in successful leaders, these three included, is confidence. I’ve heard people respond to this notion with, “Well if I had won 7 Tour de France races, was worth billions of dollars, or owned all of the music known to man I could sell for a dollar a song, I’d be confident too!”

Which do you think came first the confidence or the success?

To fully achieve success one must possess the confidence to first believe it can happen, and then have additional confidence to make it happen. Consider the general attitude in this country right now. If you believe the press this country is in doom and gloom with no end in sight. That is the easy mental option; just cave in to the pressure and roll over until it passes. Sadly, many businesses are responding in exactly that fashion. How are you responding?

Remember the leader is the one who sets the expectation the rest of the management team will follow. Are you leading from a position of strength?

Confidence means being able to look at the bad news, accept it as is, and devise a plan to overcome it. Confidence means the leader is commitment and convinced the organization he or she leads will emerge from this recession even better than when they entered the recession. Confidence is having the strength to make the necessary efforts to operate a business in spite of the negative news surrounding them. Leaders who are confident see the proper steps to take in order to be stronger, faster and more profitable.

There is a significant difference between the confidence to make the right decisions and the bravado to try and convince people the decisions made were right. Without any research to support this opinion other than personal observation over the last 25 years in business, I believe those who have the confidence to make proper business decisions frequently make the exact right decision. Conversely, it is also my observation that the manager who is insecure and lacks true confidence regardless of the amount of bluster and bravado they spew seems to possess the innate ability to most often select the wrong decision.

It isn’t a curious coincidence that successful people are confident in what they do, it is essential they have that confidence to achieve that success.