An example of the great articles I’ve read in it over the last 10 years is Fast Growth In A Slow Economy from their latest (April) issue.

It focuses on 5 strategies which have transformed the business of the owners who adopted them.

Here they are.

1.    Drop your worst customers

Inc.’s emphasis is on customers who don’t pay on time, but the definition can be broadened.

We include customers who want non-standard products or services; always want a deal on price; leave it to the last minute to order; or are abusive to employees. Some bad customers do all of these

I was interviewed recently by Diane Buckner, of the Dragon’s Den, for her post, Customer from Hell? Don’t be afraid to fire them.  She comes to the same conclusion.

Get rid of the customers who drain your lifeblood.

2.    Get help from your customers

Email or on-line surveys are inexpensive ways to get insight into customers’ thinking and challenges.

In the Inc. article, Barrett Distribution, reported a 30% response rate to their survey. The fact that 56 questions could be completed in 12 minutes helped.

Barrett surveyed half of their customers immediately and half 6 months later. That allowed for quick reaction to the feedback. One opportunity they uncovered meant business with one customer quadrupled – providing, by itself, a decent ROI on the survey.

3.    Act locally, not globally

Pursuing companies with a national brand can appear to be very lucrative. However, it’s easy to find yourself competing hard just to get their attention.

The experience of Door Number 3, an ad agency, can be typical. They pursued national accounts and won fewer and fewer of them. When they examined their business, their best accounts were located in their own area.

It’s easier to build relationships with decision makers in smaller, local accounts. Travel costs are less and you can spend more time with them, getting to really understand their business.

Finally, local companies talk amongst themselves and so there’s more word of mouth promotion and referrals from them.

4.    Treat everyone as a potential employee

Virtual organizations offer many advantages (we run one at ProfitPATH). So I can relate to the consulting company in the Inc. article. The owner, Tom Koulopoulos, needed access to specialist skills to complete bids on RFPs his company had a high odds of winning.

For a number of reasons, he couldn’t add the people he needed as full-time employees. So he forged partnerships with them, exchanging a share of the contract value if they won the RFP.

Since Koulopoulos’ company was the vendor he had to find people whose values were similar to his. The key to his success his use of his network, in many cases people he had known for many years.

5.    Get small to get big (think niche)

The owner of Medisys Health Communications’ breakthrough came when she read Blue Ocean Strategy

She realized that they had to stop trying to be all things to all people, competing with everyone else doing the same, find a niche that no one inhabited – and then own it.

So they focused on something they’d been giving away free for years and ended up collaborating with her previous competitors – doing something none of them can do.

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There’s an absolutely fabulous article on the Inc. magazine web site. Okay, everything they publish is good. But this article is way up there.

The point the author makes is that consultants who get results and deliver a great service say certain things while they are pitching for business. Business owners who listen for them can dramatically reduce their risk when selecting or hiring a consultant.

Why am I excited? Because we say these things all the time – we really do!

Here are my favourites.

1.    “I don’t know.” Why would you say anything else? The client is going to figure out that  you don’t know what you’re talking about sooner or later.

And we’re not in business to learn at a client’s expense.

Consultants should only offer services in areas with which they’re intimately familiar (no I won’t use the “expert” word, I dislike it intensely). That’s because they’ve spent a long time acquiring skill and experience in the topic. And they’re still learning and staying up to date in the field.

Our field was originally strategy development and execution. To that we’ve recently added succession planning

2.    “You can do that on your own.” I’m going to meet a client later today and tell him just that. Why? Because he has the expertise to complete some of the project steps in house.

I appreciate it when the people and companies I deal with try to save me money. Why wouldn’t our clients feel the same? And the time that we save by taking this approach we spend looking for things that truly only we can do.

It’s also our policy to bill out at the rate of the person who does the work. So if we use support staff to complete a task, we bill it at their rate, not mine.

Yes I’m a Scotsman but I like to live up to my name as the “canny Scotsman”.

3.    “I still don’t understand the requirements.” I’ll risk appearing slow to understand at the front end of a project to avoid risking missed expectations at the back end.

Despite the number of years I’ve been in business it never ceases to amaze me how quickly and easily misunderstandings occur. One bad assumption about what was meant can lead to great frustration – and damage to our reputation.

So, if there’s any room for misinterpretation it’s better to ask a clarifying question.

4.    “We’ll want to come back later to see how things turned out.” The challenge for our profession is that the consulting assignment could be finishing just as the real work is starting.

Call me nosey but, while some consultants will walk away at the end of the project, I want to know if the work we did produced results. That’s as important for us as it is for our clients.

If we’re not getting results we won’t be in business long. And I’d like a lot of warning and an opportunity to do something about it before that happens.

We offer review meetings as an option for our strategy development and strategy execution services. Even if the client opts not to use us to structure and facilitate those meetings I’ll often ask if I can sit in for part of one and listen.

The article which caused my state of advanced excitement is called “8 Things Great Consultants Say” and it’s written by Jeff Haden.

I think he’s really hit on 8, if not the 8, differentiating factors of really effective consultants.

So what do you think? Want to share some experiences?

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Jeremy Miller believes that they either:

• Never live up to their potential (even if they make a profit and do good work).
• Or they stagnate and decline.

The reason they hang on to their strategy, he says, is because it’s hard for owners and their teams to accept that they need to change when things – top and bottom line – are going well.

I know that’s true from my experience over the last 10 years at ProfitPATH – and also from  my corporate days, where I experienced it first-hand.

Jeremy mentions that, in the book The Lean Startup, Eric Ries argues that a business must constantly evaluate whether to persevere with their strategy or “pivot” to a new one.

But how do you know when to pivot or change a strategy?

I think the need to change (and therefore the timing) is driven by events. I gave some examples of them in early February 3 Times You May Need To Change Your Strategy

But, if it’s driven by events, is waiting for them to happen leaving things too late? Yes, possibly – maybe even probably.

So how do you anticipate events before they occur?

Ries’ theme of constant evaluation is echoed by Jim Collins, in his book Great By Choice. Collins’ research shows that one of the things the leaders of successful businesses do is instill a “productive paranoia” in their culture. They and their teams are always thinking about and discussing things that could change in their world – and how those changes would affect them.

This type of paranoia is productive because it gives successful companies the opportunity to consider their response – as opposed to reaction – to the events beyond their direct control.

But to be productively paranoid the owner and her team must refuse to succumb to 2 temptations.

The first is to simply be paranoid – in the conventional sense. Owners who do that are in a constant state of (over) reaction and are likely to change strategies too soon and too often.

Remember, there’s a world of difference between a response and a reaction.

The second is the temptation to become complacent. It is hard enough to accept the need for change when a company is successful. And the longer the success continues the more likely it will produce feelings of security, even invincibility and, that least attractive and most destructive of human characteristics – arrogance.

So what’s an owner to do?

No owner sets out to become complacent – that’s not the issue.

The issue is that it can be hard to recognize a problem when you’re right in the middle of it. In fact they even have a name for that.

It’s called the boiling frog syndrome.

So when someone tries to tell you something about your business which you think is wrong, misinformed, or even ridiculous, take a moment to do the “Man (or Woman)  from Mars” test before you dismiss them out of hand.

Don’t know what the “Man (or Woman) from Mars” test is? Call me and I’ll be happy to tell you for the price of a cup of coffee.

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But it’s even more important to be able to admit it to yourself.

When I started my company almost 10 years ago I made a list of everything the consultants I’d hired in my previous life had done which annoyed me.

ProfitPATH’s values statement is to do the opposite of everything that is on that list.

Something that really annoyed me was….

….having a consultant tell me that they could do something when they knew there was someone else out there who could do it better.

It meant that I paid them to learn, or perfect, a new skill or technique. Then they inflicted a sub-standard (compared to the more knowledgeable or experienced third party) performance on my company.

In the best case they wasted time, slowing me down while they got up to speed. Meaning it took me longer to achieve the results for which I was accountable.

In the worst case they didn’t master the topic or process well and that adversely affected our performance.

I felt so strongly about this type of behaviour that it was near the top of my “hate” list.

Not doing it became one of our primary values. One, I know, that has cost us revenue over the years. But I’m comfortable with that – we didn’t get into consulting for the short term and we’re not in it for the short term now.

But what happens when…

….a business owner, a potential client, knows what they don’t know – but won’t admit it to themselves or anyone else?

One of the things I’ve learned, now that we’re the consultants, is that this situation does arise – in companies of all sizes.

In my experience there are 2 possible outcomes.

The first is that the owner will go ahead and make decisions or take the company into areas that they’re not equipped to deal with. And, sooner or later, they will make a mistake.

How wide ranging the impact will be depends on a number of factors.
In the best case it might mean a minor setback. In the worst case it could seriously affect the company’s ability to operate and the livelihood of the employees.

The second possible outcome is that, rather than seek out or listen to advice, the owner will do nothing. It could be argued that this is the better alternative.

However, it’s not, it’s also a mistake. It means avoiding decisions, or putting a halt to initiatives, which could have benefited the company and the employees. And doing it knowing there are people out there who have the skill, knowledge and experience required to be successful.

If the owner continues to take this approach she or he could be the factor that limits the growth of their own company.

The moral of the tale is…..

My Mum used to say that 2 wrongs don’t make a right.

Here we have 2 different parties – consultant and business owners – doing the same thing wrong.

The result, the outcome will be the same. And it won’t be the best one for the company.

That’s just not right.

That happened to me this week.

It started when I read a blog post called “What You Can Control in a Tough Business Climate” by Karie Willyerd.

A “Corny” Story

She describes how, as communism came to an end in Romania, bureaucratic decision making resulted in a cornfield being divided amongst local farmers.

Each farmer was given 2 rows.

They didn’t – or wouldn’t – collaborate so the results of each individual’s work could be easily compared with those of his or her contemporaries.

When the following summer came, the quality of corn which grew varied widely. Some rows produced knee-high, healthy plants. Others produced shin-high plants which were sad to see.

Willyerd’s point is that everyone had been given the same seed and fertilizer and so the difference in results was caused by the people and the decisions they made.

And now to business….

Next she describes a study she conducted with some colleagues.

The goal was to determine if simply executing a business strategy, regardless of what it is, would make a difference to the value of a company.

They focused on the 4 variables they believe are the foundations for the ability to execute. And they found that improving any of them produced an increase in the company’s value.

But they found that 2 of them – aligning goals throughout the organization, top to bottom and across; and identifying and treating high performers differently than low performers – produced the greatest increase.

Putting it together

Willyerd believes that in business, as in farming, there are many factors which can’t be controlled – e.g. drought and the performance of the economy.

So the key to success is to focus on those that can be controlled.
A company’s ability to execute its strategy is definitely one of those.

Two other controllable factors are:

• Whether the owners, and their management teams, communicate explicitly with every member of their team and align them behind the company’s goals (derived from the strategy). If they don’t parts of the company may meet the business owner’s expectations, but others won’t.
• People are the seeds of the growth, and ultimately the value, of a company. Owners should, therefore, surround them with resources and nurture them with benefits – particularly the high performers.

The Variation

As you know if you saw my last post, I’m reading Jim Collins’ book Great by Choice. In it he compares pairs of companies in 7 different industries to determine why one did well in uncertainty, even chaos, while the other did not.

Collins’ main theme is that the successful companies focused exclusively on the things they could control. And they kept on doing it no matter what was happening to the things they couldn’t control.

The final chapter talks about the role of luck – and it’s not what you might think (read the book)! In the summary, Collins talks about the importance of finding great people and building deep and enduring relationships with them as a means of creating good luck.

Final thought

You could argue that focusing on what can be controlled and getting good people aligned behind the goals is common sense. But, while Willyerd’s study confirms that they do produce results, Collins’ study demonstrates that companies routinely ignore them.

Where’s the sense in that?

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A couple of things – I found myself involved with both last week and one of them applies to the other. You see “cannonballs” is a metaphor and email, for this purpose, is a marketing tool.

Other marketing tools are direct mail, adverts (on-line or traditional), newsletters and any other printed or electronic promotional piece.

And cannonballs apply to them too – and other things……

Cannonballs first

I’m reading Jim Collins book “Great By Choice”. In it, as you may know, he contrasts pairs of companies in 7 different industries. His goal is to find the reason(s) why one of the pair did incredibly well in uncertainty, even chaos, while the other company very definitely did not.

Collins and his team wanted to determine the role of innovation in the relative performance of the companies.

They found that, contrary to their expectations, the better companies did not always “out-innovate” their less successful competitors. In fact, the opposite was often true.

What the better companies did do was to combine innovation with discipline. Collins introduced the cannonball metaphor to illustrate the point.

Imagine a company has to fight a battle (with its competitors). It has both bullets and cannonballs (products/services) but a limited supply of gunpowder (resources) to fire them with.

Should the company fine tune range and direction to the target? If so how?

Bullets are the obvious choice because they use least gunpowder. Get the range and bearing right and then use cannonballs to put a dent in the competitor.

Now email………

Last week I was talking to a client who was considering lead generation ideas.

He had a proposal recommending email campaigns and some other things. Our client said he didn’t have much faith in these campaigns because the results had always been poor in the past.

I asked him which of the variables – the layout and content of the piece, the quality of his list or both, timing of the drop – had been to blame. He didn’t really know.

We hear this all the time.

So I suggested he get 2 or 3 alternative layouts for a campaign. Each should have different graphics and copy than the others.

I told him to take them to 6 to 12 customers who he trusted to tell him what they thought. Then show the alternatives, one at a time, and ask the customer what the piece told him. Saying nothing, he should record the comments word for word.

This would give him quality control for the most difficult variable – layout and copy. When he heard that a layout was communicating the message he wanted, he could email or mail it to everyone.

There are variations on this approach. He could mail different layouts to larger parts of his list (say 10 % of the list for each layout) and compare the responses. He could also email or mail the pieces at different times on different days.

But whichever variation he chose, he would be firing bullets. Only when he found the layout which got the response he wanted should he fire a cannonball – emailing it to everyone.

Finally, anything else………..

The metaphor has wide application.

Why launch a new product before testing it with a portion of the market first? Why move into a new region, Province or country before firing bullets at part of it first?

And yes, why adopt a change in strategy before testing that first too.

This approach may take a little longer but it will dramatically reduce the risks and conserve valuable resources.

Any thoughts?

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I was talking to him about the strategy development and execution processes. And he asked……………

“What about the people, where are the people in all of this?”

So I told him about the 5P’s. Of course – being the wit that he is – he immediately thought I was talking about my weak bladder. But I put him straight.

All of the companies that I’ve worked with, which are consistently Profitable, seem to have a focus on the same 4 things. Several years ago we began referring to them as People, Planning, Process and Performance. In the diagram they overlap because they are all in  action at the same time – and they intersect because they interact with each other and form a continuous loop.

Performance

I always start with Performance which provides both clear direction for the company and the benchmark against which success is measured.

It spans having Vision, Values and Mission statements, through setting and communicating clear goals, to making sure every employee understands his/her role in achieving them. And it includes comparing actual results against the goals regularly, giving feedback and adapting where necessary.

Planning

Then I usually talk about the huge difference between Planning – which is a process – and a Plan or Plans– which are outputs.

There are very few occasions when it’s necessary to write a Business Plan, the most common one being when a company is looking for funding.

But Planning is ingrained in the culture in high performing companies. An effective Strategic Planning process will produce a strategy that will work. The Annual Business Planning process is the key to executing that strategy and turning it into results.

Process

I told my friend that we focus on 3 types of Process.

Functional processes keep each area of the company – e.g. Sales, Marketing, HR and Operations areas –operating efficiently. Control processes monitor the key performance indicators – e.g. sales pipeline, product quality and lead times – and give the owner early warning of potential problems.Financial processes produce accurate and timely reports on the financial health of the company.

People

I always save People for last.

After spending 20 some years in corporations and over 12 years working with business owners there is no doubt in my mind that People is the single most important element in success.

The essence of leadership is finding, motivating and engaging the right People and creating an environment (culture) in which they can contribute fully.

A weak strategy in the hands of the right People will trump the right strategy in the hands of weak People – every time.

And that, I told my friend, is where people fit in………….

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Of all the interesting and valuable things Tony Hsieh says about managing people in his book “Delivering Happiness” for me, one concept stood out.

That was “The Pipeline”.

Hsieh makes the point that, unlike many companies, Zappos doesn’t believe that (individual) people are an asset. They think of a pipeline of people with varying levels of skill and experience as the asset.

Here’s why I really like this approach.

It Solves 3 Fundamental Problems

First, traditional thinking is that people are a company’s greatest asset. But if an employee leaves, the company has lost an asset.

The second problem (which we see all the time) occurs as a company grows, an employee who was considered valuable, or even outstanding, at an earlier stage of the company’s life begins to disappoint and become a liability. It’s usually a result of the employee not developing or upgrading his or her skills as the company grows.

The third problem occurs when the company deals with the other 2 problems by bringing in someone from outside the company.  The new person may bring the right skills and have great experience – but they don’t fit the company culture.

The “People Pipeline” Solution

• Bring almost all new hires in via entry level positions. This offers two benefits.
  • If they aren’t a fit for any reason the company faces the least expense and disruption by making another quick change.
  • Entry level positions will likely attract people with limited experience. The new employees are more likely to be open minded about adopting the company’s processes – and culture.

• Provide a comprehensive training program and mentors for the new hires. Then offer a series of courses, either internally or at local colleges, which cover the skills the employees will need in order to progress in the company.

• Make the route upwards quite clear.
  • Set expectations around when employees can expect to achieve each level.
  • Make completion of certain courses a pre-requisite for promotion.
  • It helps if a company is growing at the rate Zappos did (and is doing) – that generates lots of new positions in the org. chart. However, positions further up the organization will become available as people move on (natural attrition). At this point a business owner could argue that all of the investment in that person has been lost. That’s possibly true – but every company loses some employees (e.g. they move to another city, make a change in career).
  • By investing in training and offering a career path a company may keep those who would have drifted away for much longer.

• With the pipeline there is always someone ready to fill the shoes of the people who do leave, who have been training for the opportunity and who know the culture.

A Couple of Points to Consider

When Hsieh arrived at Zappos he was an experienced, successful business manager. And he brought one or two key management team members from his previous company – most notably his CFP – with him. So at least some members of the management team knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses and that they could work together.

On the other hand, one of the original Zappos team, Fred, joined as a buyer and rose to become a senior executive.

The pipeline can only be used when a company reaches an appropriate size. A start-up doesn’t have the resources.

If you enjoyed this post you’ll like 10 Strategy Tips from Tony Hsieh.

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One of my things is telling people that they shouldn’t be changing their strategy.

I do it when business owners – or CEOs – say things like “It’s time for our annual strategy meeting”. The implication – for me at any rate – is that they change their strategy every year.

But that would be just plain wrong.

Changes to a well thought-out, well-crafted strategy shouldn’t be driven simply because it’s been in place 1, 3 or 5 years.

A strategy shouldn’t necessarily be changed even if it isn’t producing results. In this situation I always look at how well (or badly) the strategy is being executed before I look at the strategy itself.

So when should a company review its strategy? And what makes that review and any subsequent adaptation, revision or recreation necessary?

Here are three occasions.

1.    When the company has outgrown its strategy.

There’s research which suggests that companies can “plateau” when they achieve certain levels of revenue. Depending on the industry those levels are around $5 million, approx. $10 -12 million, somewhere between $18 – 30 million and so on.

Typical symptoms of “plateauing” are upward spikes in revenue which can’t be maintained, increasing lead times delivering the product or service, decreasing levels of customer satisfaction and higher employee turnover.

The plateauing occurs because the things – e.g. strategy, processes – the company has done up to that point in its life can’t support any more growth. It’s like expecting a teenager to fit into the clothes they wore when they were eight.

To rekindle growth the owner either has to change the strategy, the way it’s executed – or both.

2.    Significant internal change.

This occurs when, for example, a company develops a game changing new product or service or finds a new way of doing its existing business. This gives it an edge over its competitors by e.g. reducing costs or increasing efficiencies.

To reap maximum benefit from this new competitive advantage the owner will have to adapt or change the existing strategy.

3.    Significant external change.

In this case the owner or CEO has to react to e.g.:

• A competitor who is taking advantage of a significant internal change.
• The industry “maturing”. In other words the business has been around long enough for a number of competitors to have become large enough to e.g.:
  • Reduce their costs and pass this on as reductions in the selling price or,
  • Buy up smaller players who introduce game changing technology or process improvements. This is also known as industry consolidation.
• Major changes in e.g. the economy, labour pool, legislation governing the industry, or all of the above.

Continuing with a “business as usual” approach under any of these situations is clearly not going to be effective.

To be fair, when business owners and CEOs say “It’s time for our annual strategy meeting” they usually mean that it’s time to start the annual business planning process. That is something that must be done every year.

And, since we have services which can make the annual business planning process more effective, perhaps I’m not as crazy as I look – I mean sound…….

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And I’ll bet that everyone can think of at least one favourite tune.

So what has a favourite tune got to do with a business? Bear with me for a moment and I’ll tell you.

Let’s go back to music first. I’ll bet my favourite tunes won’t be the same as yours. Mine might be classical (or bagpipes) yours might be heavy metal or hard rock. So they won’t sound the same.

But the funny thing is, although they don’t sound the same they will have some things in common.

Such as what you might ask?

Well, with a few exceptions, they probably feature more than one musical instrument. Perhaps there’s someone singing, in fact there may be backup singers as well.

Our favourite tunes will also have a musical score and – where required – lyrics for the vocalists.

The score is a great thing. It not only tells the musician which instrument to play – and when – it also tells them how the instrument must be played. Pretty detailed action plan wouldn’t you say.

Lyrics are also essential for anything other than a pure instrumental. They tell the vocalists – lead and backup – what to sing and how to emphasize the words.

OK so where am I going with this?

Well, I was listening to one of my favourite tunes the other day and a few things occurred to me.

Although each piece of music is different, like companies in different industries, they do have things in common.

The instruments – guitar, drums, key board – are like the different parts of a company – sales, operations, finance. They can play by themselves but when they work together the result can be amazing.

The score is like the strategy – it determines how the band/orchestra will get to the final result. It tells every instrument/musician how to work together while giving them a plan in the form of the notes and chords to be played.

In the better bands, the individual members have input to the score. Sometimes the situation allows them to improvise (you could say the plan is flexible). In some situations improvisation – and even innovation – is required. Jazz springs to mind.

But no individual instrument or musician has a role (departmental plan) that is more important than the score (business strategy). Think of an orchestra for a moment. The musicians in each section – e.g. strings, wind and percussion – see their own part in the piece. But only the conductor has the full score.

And that brings me to my last couple of points.

Every band has a leader – lead guitarist, lead singer, band major – who keeps the focus on the score or lyrics. Rather like the role of the CEO or business owner. He or she doesn’t have to know how to play all of the instruments; the specialists are there for that.

Some bands or orchestras become more popular than others. And, while individual players/musicians may come and go, some bands perform for a long time – years, decades or longer. Innovating and working with new material but maintaining superior quality of output. Why – because the culture, amongst other things, fosters that type of environment.

Finally, the public – you and I – doesn’t pay for the score. We pay for the result – the sound, the music, how it makes us feel.

And that’s an important perspective (particularly for consultants). No one pays for the strategy, they pay for the results – and how the results make them feel.

So, what kind of music are you going to make in 2012?

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