A Strategic Getaway

The home stretch for this calendar year is in view. It’s a great time to review YTD performance against the current strategy and it is also a good time for some sober second thought about whether the current plan is sufficiently robust for your next fiscal year.

Convention Business Travel (CBT) is worth your serious consideration.

You can take the team to a retreat destination of your choice this fall and I can help you make the experience unforgettable for you and your team and also a Smart Investment. As your facilitator and business coach, I can help you map your meeting discussions in an agenda to meet your business objectives AND with the help of our Strategic Partner at Convention Business Travel you gain access to their Agenda Builder Tool with which you will record the meeting discussions, duration and participation.  The report provided by the Agenda Builder Tool is the document you will need to attach to your expenses for Canada Revenue Agency purposes. It supports your travel expense claim and is immediately available, upon request.  Furthermore, my facilitation exercises and work assignments are all built-in and ready for us to discover together…

http://www.conventionbusinesstravel.com/FocalPoint.aspx

What could be better!  You and your team get some good planning time together. I add additional value, truly making this a Smart Investment.  Furthermore, depending upon your particular industry regulations, the FocalPoint content qualifies for Continuing Education Credits. (for more detail visit:  http://www.conventionbusinesstravel.com/Education/FocalPoint.aspx).  Talk about two birds with a single stone. But it gets even better!  You also have the opportunity for some free time that you can use to further improve team morale.

It’s easy and it’s strategic!

BIZBUZZ: R. Whiteley, The Customer Driven Company

This is episode 7 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations that challenge business owners to consider new possibilities and to Act Boldly.  The following video highlights some of the content from Richard Whiteley’s book The Customer Driven Company that made sense to me.

Hi, I’m Gary Brown a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to BIZ BUZZ.

I’ve chosen to comment on The Customer Driven Company, by Richard Whiteley.  Not surprisingly, this book deals with the relationship that we have with our customers.

I’d like to highlight four observations from the book that interest me.

The first deals with vision.  I know that this is a repeat from my most recent BIZBUZZ episode, but I believe it bears repeating.  Whiteley defines vision as a source of inspiration and a guide to decision making.  How often do we use our vision statement as a litmus test for decision making?

My next observation expands on vision statements.  Whiteley encourages the reader to communicate the vision constantly.  He stresses the need to establish challenging goals that are driven by the vision and to embody it in our everyday behaviour.  How many of us act on this advice?

Comment number three is specific to our customers.  The suggestion is that we should make it easy for our customers to complain to us about our products and services.  That might sound trite but do we even have a method for customer complaints?

Finally, I’d just like to mention that Whiteley identifies what he calls the seven essentials that are the game plan of winners.  Here they are:

1. Create a customer keeping vision

2. Saturate your company with the voice of the customer

3. Go to school on the winners

4. Liberate your customer champions

5. Smash the barriers to customer-winning performance

6. Measure, measure, measure

7. Walk the talk

That’s it for The Customer Driven Company.

Your comments are always welcome.

Stay tuned for more BIZ BUZZ.

What Will You Do Differently Next Year?

For those whose fiscal year follows the calendar, a new year beckons.

Will you be entering the new business cycle with a “steady as she goes” attitude or do you recognize that more of the same might, in fact, be a risky approach?  It could well be that you are coming to the close of a strong year and your focus might easily be “how do we maintain our momentum?”  But, how strong has your year really been?  You can certainly compare your current results against the prior year and state unequivocally that the numbers are up (if in fact they are).  But a more relevant comparison would be how you are doing against your competitors.  Is it possible that your competitors are enjoying an even better year than you are and consequently, you are actually slipping behind?  Of course it’s possible, but how would you know if that has been happening?

When you get fully absorbed in running your business, it is very easy to remain in technician mode. You just keep “working in your business”.  If you are not careful, you can lose sight of what is going on around you.  You might think that all is well with your customer base, but how do you actually know that is the case? Could it be that your presumptions are based upon the old adage that “no news is good news”?

In the absence of certainty, why don’t you build a scenario in which you assume that the competition is out flanking you.  Rather that adopting an attitude of laissez faire, why don’t you assume that your current strategy could stand some revisiting?  Perhaps you might challenge yourself by making your strategy more “ruggedized”.

The author Seth Godin suggests that playing it safe is the riskier approach to running your business.  Now, please recognize that I’m not suggesting that strengthening your strategy means a wholesale change to your current business model.  But, I am suggesting that the status quo is a dangerous place to be.

Why don’t you decide that 2014 will be the year that you determine what actions can be taken to be different in a meaningful way to your customer base?

BIZBUZZ – S. Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

This is episode 1 of my version of BIZBUZZ.  I stimulate conversations that challenge business owners to consider new possibilities and to act boldly.

This video highlights some of my selections of the most significant comments made by Seth Godin in his book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.

Hi, I’m Gary Brown a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to BIZBUZZ.  This is my attempt to help you generate some buzz in your business.

I’ve chosen to comment on Seth Godin’s book entitled Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

I really enjoyed reading this book and I found a number of very thought provoking ideas and suggestions.

I’d like to comment on three of them.

The first is the overall emphasis on differentiation.  Godin says this OUT LOUD when he claims that the opposite of remarkable is very good.  This bears repeating … the opposite of remarkable is very good!  If you think of a scale that has remarkable at one end and say, mediocre on the other end, how many of us would have placed our business on the wrong side of very good?

My second take-away is that it is safer to be risky than to play it safe.  In a crowded marketplace, Seth Godin suggests that playing it safe, or fitting in, frequently leads to failure.  Are we prepared to exchange safety for riskiness?

Finally, my third choice is the suggestion that your marketing message needs to be targeted towards the innovators and early adopters in the marketplace for your product or service.  Godin describes your message as an ‘ideavirus’ and your task is to find the early adopters who are most likely to ‘sneeze’ your message onwards.  Consequently, he strongly suggests that you avoid a marketing message that is aimed at the general marketplace.  It’s a waste of your resources.

That’s it for the Purple Cow and for me.

Let me know if this produces any insights for you.