Beating the Competition

One of the first steps is knowing how to play the game. A lot of you are very good at selling the product or service that you represent – you’ve gone to college, invested money and time on being expert on getting that hat completely on. However, now that you are business owners, you also have a multitude of hats in your business, some of you have so many hats that you wear that they are stacked up to the ceiling.

How much money have you spent becoming the CEO of your business? The majority of the time when a business owner comes to Measurable Solutions, this is the first investment they have made in becoming a little bit more proficient as a CEO.

What does this have to do with beating the competition? Everything! I use to work with dentists in the mid ‘80s in Seattle, Washington in a building in the middle of downtown. There were 80 separate dental offices in that building. When a dentist retired and moved out of the building, a brand new dentist would move into that office. Do you know what? The dentists in the bigger practices would come around and take that guy under his arm and mentor him and show him how to get new patients and show him how to do a better job and show him how to be a much faster success than they were.

Now, what if you had that in this profession? Usually, when a new business moves in across the street from an existing business, that existing business says “Oh my gosh, what am I to do? This competition is going to be robbing customers from me before you know it.”

However, there are more than enough customers to go around so what is all the worry and drama concerning existing or potential competition?

The problem is this: your community, your referral sources and even your customers don’t truly know what you do; they don’t know what kind of results you get.

I’ve told business owners this datum with regard to competition when they come in as a new Measurable Solutions’ client. They look at me kind of cross-eyed but, after a while of learning how to expand their practice and gain more control over the business, they come to me and say, “Jeff you were right – there isn’t any such thing as competition. That’s just a bunch of hooey.” They are now equipped to win the game and know that there is really no competition to beat.

Ask the Owner!

Originally Shaun and I looked at just setting up an “Ask Shaun Kirk” link on his blog but then we realized that when we decided to become partners we did so because both of us brought something to the table that they other needed.

Shaun had first hand experience in being a private practice owner and I had experience in not only starting business ventures and expanding them to stellar levels but also in finance. Between the two of us we had the bases covered when we started Measurable Solutions in my carriage house (garage).

So I too have a link where you can feel free to ask me any questions you may have about your business.

Both Shaun and I are looking forward to receiving your questions and I will be posting those I receive on my blog with my answer if it is something I feel will benefit the group.

Jeff

What Lies Keep You From Expanding Your Business?

As co-founder of Measurable Solutions, I have been delivering our introductory marketing course for a few years now. During this time we’ve had several hundred business owners come through our facility: some are large and some are small. What is interesting is that I notice there are certain characteristics that all of them have in common to some degree, and I’d like to make them known to you in case perhaps you haven’t recognized any of them in yourself or in your own business.

Commonly, a business owner has many things that take his or her attention away from the actual expansion of the organization. The first thing to recognize is that the attention is taken away from the expansion of the organization – until that is realized none of the other barriers will be in view. It’s not necessarily that business owners want a large facility or multiple facilities, or their name in lights or a shrine built to them, it’s just what we commonly find is what most people want is the ability to run their business from a distance. And many people are in business for two years or twenty years, and they have not been able to achieve that goal. There are some of you that have, and that’s fantastic.

We find that in the area of expanding a business stably there are a lot of reasons why this problem has never been addressed. These are what I call the lies that keep you from expanding your business.

One common lie that I find quite interesting is the number of business owners who come into our company and state that they do practically nothing to expand their business as if they are proud of it, in some bizarre way. I certainly expect that all of us should be doing good work, and if you aren’t at least achieving that end goal of delivering an exchangeable product to your customers, you should just quit and do something else. But assuming that everybody is delivering an exchangeable product and their business standards are high, I’m always shocked to hear that a large number of owners do nothing at all to expand their business. I usually hear things like, “Our customers know who we are and they keep coming back — word of mouth has gotten us this far so I see no reason to change and we have been marketing our business this way for years.” What’s usually underneath all that is they don’t know what to do to market promote and expand their business so they do nothing and hope that their products and customer service will somehow keep the numbers going up.

Another lie that we hear very often as a reason for not expanding the business is being overwhelmed. Now, it is an interesting thing that whenever you propose a solution to anyone who is overwhelmed already with things to do or problems in life, they won’t implement it. I mean you could be leading them straight to the fountain of youth, but they would deny it and go in an opposite direction. I find commonly that overwhelm is nothing more than an inability to recognize the important things from the unimportant things. This is easily resolved but not until overwhelm at the top is handled. Once the owner can take a moment to really look at what is going on in the business he can see what is important and what is not important. Obviously this is a very important point to address and handle.

Sometimes I hear another lie that holds a business down, “I don’t want to be too busy.” Now, I can understand how if you were the only one in your business and it got busier, that you personally would be busier. But in the most successful businesses that I am familiar with, the owner doesn’t work more hours, he or she works less. The staff doesn’t necessarily work more hours, they just don’t have any downtime. It’s run efficiently, its run smarter. When someone tells me that they don’t want to be too busy, what they are telling me is they are already overwhelmed. And what is interesting, is if you take your production volume from where it is presently, and cut it in half, just cut it in half right now, would you work half time? Or would you work frantically full time plus try to figure out what you could do to get the numbers back up to where they are right now? My guess is that you would be working frantically. Now, if you knew exactly what to do, and what are the vital steps that you must take in order to turn that thing around, then you have executive prowess. If you work 60 hours a week and you are not able to get your stats into a higher range and increase the volume in your organization, then it’s likely you are doing either things that shouldn’t be done or you’re doing trivial functions that quite honestly don’t expand your business. The most difficult thing to spot is what are the most important and vital steps to take. I usually don’t hear a business owner tell me that “my numbers dropped by one half, and I’m working about 60 hours a week doing trivial stuff that doesn’t work, but I’m going in there and I’m giving it my all nevertheless.” Most owners consider that they are doing exactly what is necessary to boom the business. But if the stats are not rising, they are not doing the vital and correct steps. Plain and simple.

Expanding your organization is not as complicated as you may think. It doesn’t have to cause more time, trouble, or stress, but there are vital steps that must be taken to make that happen. And a little bit of time is necessary on the part of the owner, to step away from day-to-day production to an executive responsibility to make that happen. Those who have done that successfully look back and wonder what took them so long to make the decision and take on the viewpoint of an owner.

The business is supposed to enhance your life in some way. You decided to go out on your own, because you wanted to be your own boss. I think what you ought to do is to consider doing it professionally. Be a professional executive and a professional owner. Take on both and do them both well because you may have your own goals that you would like to obtain as a business owner, personal and financial. But it is the responsibility of the owner to take care of his or her staff, so whatever you need to make financially or you have as a goal that would make you happy, you better double or triple it, because it isn’t going to be enough to take care of your staff and provide what those individuals would like to achieve working with and working for you. Your goal needs to be bigger.

If you have a successful business that is doing well and is taking good care of you financially, but you still feel stressed because you have to think about it or worry about it or fret about it, or you have to show up every day to see how things are going, then what you need to do is to improve the skill of those staff who actually run the organization day to day as executives so that they can run it for you. That is really how you get distance from your organization. Have a competent team who knows how to get things done and can make the practice grow in your absence. We can help you. We do it every day. It’s very simple, it is not complicated. The only decision that has to be made is that there is a desire and a willingness to go into action on the part of the owner to expand his or her organization. We take it from there.

How to Take Effective Action to Generate New Business

Over the years I have heard tales of woe and success from around the country concerning business owners and their efforts to generate new business. Their solutions have been many and varied but in their mantra of reasons “why” they are not increasing the volume of their business is a common thread which winds throughout all inaction in that area.

Why wouldn’t someone take effective action to generate new business? Is it that some of us feel we just can’t squeeze another free minute out of our already jammed days? Or is it that over our years in business we have achieved a level of success large or small, which we have settled into and from that vantagepoint we cannot recognize that there may be solutions, which work that we haven’t tried?

Some business owners are amazingly creative in their efforts. But they may also have stacked up failures or their successes have been hit or miss because they lack a basic understanding of what it is that actually produces a result in the Public relations and marketing arena. Their mantra then becomes “I’ve tried it all, what else is there to do? There is no real solution.”

How many of us have gone out on marketing calls, have had what seemed like a great “meeting” only to never hear from them again? How many of us have experienced the up and down roller coaster of generating new business and then, from the increase in business which winds us up with us directly on the day-to-day production lines, seen our new business again wane? We can sometimes feel like we’re riding a wave, a wave over which we have no control.

There is a solution, which works. A simple solution that involves taking the time to put together a realistic plan for the future that encompasses not just the actions needed to drive in new business but also the actions needed to ensure that you can deliver what has been promised.

The steps, roughly, can be said to be:

1. Determine what needs to be produced in each area of your company over the next six months in order to meet the goals you set for your business this year.

2. Starting with the areas that handle the actions necessary to drive business into your company, work out a plan that meet the target.

3. Now you need to work out how this much new business will be serviced. This may include the addition of new personnel, more space, and more equipment.

Once the above is done, ensure that all of the plans align with each other and that based on the data to hand they will result in meeting the targets you have set. Now as the owner all you need to do is simply ensure that each step of the plans are executed completely and on time.

How to Increase Productivity in Your Business

Do you keep a “to-do list” on what you wish to accomplish each day? There may have been a point in time where you did this quite routinely, and perhaps it has dropped out. Most people will make a list of things they wish to accomplish in the morning and by the end of the day they didn’t get one thing off the list done. Sometimes this becomes so bad that many business owners decide not to even keep a daily to-do list anymore and just walk into the office and wait till the first employee gives them an order of what they need, and the owner does it for them. This is a backwards way of thinking.

The simplicity of placing a couple of targets on a to-do list and making that your known goal and overcoming whatever those not unknowable obstacles are in order to achieve that end, would make you more happy. Simply speaking, if you got your to-do list done each day, how would you feel at the end of the day? Would you feel good or bad? Likely good. Accomplishing any target or any goal that you set out to do will make you happy.

Too often there are a variety of different barriers that get in the way of achieving one’s goal. The unfortunate thing is we tend to put attention on the things that stop us, and not attention on things that allow us to win. Look at today. What are the problems that you are trying to handle outside of the basic production for the day? It’s likely that these problems do not have any impact on your expansion even if you never handled them at all.

Sometimes it is important to recognize the barriers that are in front of you that keep you from achieving your goal and just ignore them. Sometimes the best thing that you can do is nothing while carrying forward towards reaching your known goal. Let’s take a look at how simple this can be accomplished. Let’s say you walk into your office on Monday morning, and you look at how production occurred the prior week, and you have an immediate staff meeting, for say 30 minutes, and you say, with confidence that “we are going to get our production up by 10% before the end of the week.” And then you pose the question to the group: “what can each of you do?” Insist they actually give you an answer to this problem. And then write it down on your to-do list -- those steps that your staff said they could do to get your statistics up by 10% that week. And those would be your known sub-goals toward the overall goal of a rise of production by 10%. And then you overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of achieving those goals until you accomplish the end result you are searching for. Certainly you do this fairly routinely. Most business owners do this or if they don’t, they should be.

This inability or difficulty in getting things done transcends from the owner to the staff. If you give your staff random orders without any recognition of what is important and what’s not, the staff member will take the unimportant to be equal to the vital task. So it is key for you to delegate towards expansion.
By simply delegating toward expansion, putting together a real list of actions to take each day that will result in expansion and completing what is on the list you will increase the productivity of your business. It is that simple.

What do most Business Owners Have in Common?

Over the years I have dealt with all types and sizes of businesses. I have seen all types and sizes of problems as well as quite a variety of solutions that emerge to resolve them. Throughout my experiences in consulting various companies and working to unravel the difficulties they sometimes encounter a very basic common denominator is always present. That common denominator is the inability to confront or perceive what is really
going on.

Now, there can be a number of ways that that common denominator manifests itself. It can be an owner or manager who is unable to face staff so turns a blind eye to what may be happening in the various areas. It might be that there is too much “wishful thinking” going on because confronting what the “dangerous” scene really is unpalatable. It may also be something as simple as not being able to perceive because one has no information in an area such as statistics that reflect the production and viability of the company.

Most businesses to some degree or another use statistics. Few however use them to measure the individual production of each staff member or areas of the practice. It can seem like a formidable task but it doesn’t have to be if one has a basic understanding of organization and what products are really important to its survival.

If an individual staff knows what it is he or she is supposed to produce and it can be measured then it is not difficult to assign him a statistic that will reflect
his production.

One of the first steps in solving the common denominator is being able to measure one’s production so that one can confront and “see”.

This is an amazing step for most people as it puts them into a position where they can now be in charge of what happens in their own practice as, for the first time, they can actually “see what’s happening.”