Step out of your business for one day on Friday September 30th, 2011 with your San Jose/Santa Clara area ActionCOACH Team and find your White Hot Center

Steve Jobs did this by turning the cell phone into a total connectivity device that allowed people to leverage their time, become more organized, and have fun all in the palm of their hand. Jobs also created his own White Hot Center in the communications device market. Everyone else became ME TOO followers.

Nike’s meteoric success in the 1970’s can be attributed to Phil Knight’s partnership with Oregon track coach, Bill Bowerman. By partnering with Bowerman, Nike went straight to the White Hot Center of American running.

As the running boom receded in the mid-1980’s, Nike needed a new White Hot Center. They found it in a Farah Fawcett poster in which Farah was wearing a tight red swimsuit wearing red and white Nike Cortez shoes. Soon after, millions of women had those shoes on their shopping list.

Where is your market’s White Hot Center?

Let’s Find It on September 30th, 2011

Step out of your business for one day on Friday September 30th, 2011 with your San Jose/Santa Clara area ActionCOACH Team and find your White Hot Center

Featuring a special guest speaker from the Tony Robbins Leadership Academy

Register here now for our GrowthCLUB

Chicken Little is on the loose.

Our friends in Washington, Wall Street, and the News are at it again, creating that vicious cycle of self fulfilling negative outlook resulting in corresponding negative behavior that pushes economies into recession. So if we as business owners cannot influence all of the lemmings to reconsider jumping off a cliff, what can we do to protect our own economy from following the herd?

The WORST thing you can do is hunker down, do nothing, and wait it out like many of the interviewees in the news seem to be planning to do. That is the same thing as being carried by the lemmings off the cliff.

Now is the time to be preemptive in your marketing strategies, create efficiencies in your operations, and buy your competitor’s customers… or just buy your less optimistic competitor and capture his/her customer base.

If you have been operating without a strategic plan, build one now. If you have one, revise it. Review your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and Guarantee. Have a prospective outlook. Will your ideal customer and available target market look than same in 6 months or one year as it does now? If not, start thinking about alternative markets, product, and service mix. Begin redesigning you marketing collateral to align with market trends. Understand the five key numbers every business should be measuring and start measuring them religiously.

These are all activities business owners should do continuously but defer in favor of managing daily operations. Don’t defer them any longer. If you can’t seem to find the time to do it, get outside help from professionals who will show you how to get back in control and take positive action.

Above all, avoid Chicken Little as much as possible and join the Optimists Club.

At a recent meeting of my COO Forum Chapter in San Jose, we had a stimulating discussion about the possibility of employee churn returning to companies here in Silicon Valley, particularly in specialized software and tech engineering sectors, and how companies could prepare for and possibly mitigate it. The discussion had been prompted by a June, 26th article in the San Jose Mercury News about how many “back end” programming engineers were being courted with multiple offers. We had kicked around many issues in the discussion, such as company culture, shared vision, looking back at how companies had dealt with staff during cutbacks, etc. This got me thinking about how, in bygone days of full employment the concept of an Organizational Development Department was something strategically minded companies considered as essential for success.

First, let me clarify that Organizational Development (OD) is not the training department, or simply human resources that fill job requisitions as many companies have tried to pretend. A true Organizational Development Department is one that aligns its mission and purpose to fulfill the strategic objectives of the organization through recruiting, leveraging, maintaining, and investing in its human capital.

Ideally, the head of OD should be C level or intimately connected to the C level to design the org chart and allocate job descriptions to the appropriate boxes that enable the organization to accomplish its mission and goals as efficiently as possible. Having defined the boxes and established roles and responsibilities, the OD department is then tasked with filling, maintaining, and retaining ideally suited personnel in those positions. As side note here; having engineers perform routine administrative tasks to save a staff position is NOT efficient use of resources, and I have often seen this practice foster simmering resentment in professional staff units.

Part of the development strategy should be allowing for growth opportunities within that structure. That means providing company sponsored education and training opportunities, some of the first things typically cut from the budget along with free coffee in the lunch room, when going into a recessionary period.

Having an OD Department Head in lean times can temper the reactive nature of a CFO in reducing costs when revenue projections begin to fall off. This can actually save money for an organization by reducing churn in the surviving staff the moment more opportunity in the job market becomes available. Recruiting and replacing key staff generally costs two to two and half times the annual salary of the vacant staff position in large and mid-sized organizations. An OD department will add value to the longer term view and more flexibility to respond to changes in staffing requirements.

The next time your managers start using language like, “just be glad you still have a job” with your employees, consider how much this may cost you down the road when opportunity and resentment give your team members more attractive options. Moral and productivity go hand in hand. That free coffee in the lunchroom may actually be creating substantial ROI.

The most successful strategy that I have employed with my clients in the last 24 months in a very challenging economic climate has been review and refinement of their USP, or Unique Selling Proposition.

To illustrate the power of this strategy, I submit to you an example from one of my coaching clients.

This particular client’s primary business was building the frame, foundation, and outer finish for new home developers. As you might conclude, this business all but evaporated early in 2009. When he called me to find out about our coaching programs, he was down to his last $90,000 in work under contract and had not won a new bid in over three months. I asked him why he felt he had to get work by low bid and his answer was, “Isn’t that what everybody does in this business?” My answer was: only if you want to live and DIE by price. Someone will always be a little cheaper in a slow market when you are playing the price game.

After giving him an idea of how we would approach his situation together, he agreed to sign up for our PowerUP COACH program and my work began.

In the first month of the coaching program, I took him through our USP and Guarantee Builder questionnaire, redefined his ideal customer, created a powerful guarantee, and aligned his marketing material to create a compelling offer to the new target market. We hired two new experienced commissioned sales people, created a marketing calendar of events and strategies to put them to work on, and within the fourth month of coaching, he had landed $500,000 in contracts that he had signed at the price he could make his target profit at. 12 months after starting the program, he had built his book of business to $2 million, and 24 months later, he had a total of over $8 million either under contract or in negotiations. All of this happened within a construction market period where other contractors were crying and dying.

He is now picking his customers at his price instead of letting his customers pick him in a low bid arena.

The fortunate thing for him was he was able to put aside his “I Know” attitude and stopped doing what “everybody in this business is doing” to look at his business from a different angle. His willingness to change saved his business and his personal life.

Are you simply covering your head and waiting for things to change back to your customary way of doing business, or you ready to come at the market from a different angle and attract different customers? Your answer to that question may be the difference between extinction and survival.

Did you ever walk into your favorite restaurant, where you usually get great food and service and find it packed with large crowd? You notice the normally friendly staff is impatient with you. The server gets at least one or more of your party’s orders wrong when the food finally comes. Maybe some of your food is cold or your steak is overcooked.

Maybe you forgive them this time, or maybe you start to look for another favorite place to go.

Did the increase in sales help that business or hurt it?

What kind of strategies could the business owner have had in place to deal with an unusually large crowd? A cook and servers on call? Maybe a free appetizer coupon for those who had to wait too long or didn’t get their order correctly?

When you set out to drive more business in, be prepared for what you wished for. What if you are surprised by the response? Don’t miss the opportunity to capture all of the new business and profit, and get new customers that will continue to come back. Have a capacity surge plan in place, and most of all, keep smiling!

Business owners and decision makers may sometimes find themselves trapped in a rut and unable to move the business beyond its current capacity. This can often be traced to barriers within the business owner’s mindset.

Ask yourself as a business owner: What is my picture of my ideal business? How much profit do I want? How much time do I want to be spending in the business?

I have often found that small business owners have a much smaller vision of their business than the business is really capable of becoming. Many have never spent time to think about those three goals, let alone written them down until I have asked the question, but the root of the barrier to dreaming big has always boiled down to belief. The belief that they can’t create a hugely successful business without a tremendous amount of hard work and stress.

Yes, work is required to make a business successful, but a systematic application of measured strategies and regular planning will multiply the effect of your efforts many times over. Work smart not hard. Work on as much as in your business.

In my next post, I will talk about the single most effective strategy that has yielded massive results for my clients in this challenging economic climate.