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Knowing Who You Serve

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After we have been in business awhile, we should really have a defined business model.  The model tells us how we are going to serve our clients and run our business.  We need to stay true to our business model as it will help keep things streamlined AND you sane.

So now that we have the “how” down, is our job over? – NO… There is so much more to be done.  The right question now is Who … Who are we serving?  It’s been said many times before and I’ll say it again – “Everyone” is not your market.  Let’s take my business for instance.  I could say that every business needs bookkeeping – true Statement.  Does that mean “Every” business owner would be served well by my team.  The answer is no.  I don’t have anyone on my team that understands restaurants.  The business owner would be better served by a bookkeeping company that specializes in restaurants.

Some would say specializing to narrow will close the door on opportunity.  I say it opens the door to opportunity.  You get known in a very small “world” as the best at what you do.  You can “Do” less and accomplish more.  You heard that right – your team will get faster and better at what they do.  They can create more value to your client.  That’s smart business.

Mike tells a story of a woman that decided to by a gym franchise.  She wanted to help obese people become healthy and vibrant.  She does research and finds a failing franchise in an area where obesity is running rampant.  Her whole marketing message is about helping people with obesity.  She is successful.  She turns the failing gym around in just a few months.  She goes on and buys several more and makes them successful as well.  Do you think she would have been successful if she tried to get “everyone” to come to her gym?  Of course not, the marketing for the overweight is very different from weekend warriors.  She knew her market and didn’t worry about other markets.

I would encourage you to think about a segment of the market that you can serve and sever very well.  For example, if you are an insurance agent, you could say that all homeowners need your product.  OR you could say that all homeowners with special breed dogs need your services.  The second one could change the way you market your insurance product.

So, even if “everyone” does need your product or services, doesn’t mean they are your client.  Learn who you serve.

I’d love your thoughts – drop me a line and tell me who you specifically serve.

 

Re-balancing Your Team Part 2

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In the book Clock Work by Mike Michalowicz, we learned about re-balancing your team.  It is true that we need to find team members that thrive in the work that needs to be done, but what happens to those existing clients while you make the transition.  We need to make sure our clients feel taken care of even during a transition or re-balance of work in your company. 

Access and Take Action

I’m aware that the book Clock Works is about having your company run without you, the business owner.  However, if you’ve made the mistake I have, you will want to consider taking back your biggest clients OR your biggest referral sources.  That is exactly what I did.  I protected the QBR.  Remember what the QBR is?  It’s the Queen Bee Role.  It’s the sole purpose … the soul reason your clients are working with you.  Yes, I took clients back on my desk and I’m not sorry for it.  You too may need to take back work if you’ve got a situation on your hands that may disrupt your empire.

The next thing I did was start to train ALL of my team members on this niche. I accessed my teams’ personalities and strengths to those of my client’s personalities and strengths.  I paired them up and began to see both team member and client start to trust, bond and strengthen each other.  I kept those chosen few on my desk until I saw a team member emerge that could really handle these VIP clients.  Then slowly, I started to introduce the idea that they – the clients – would start to work with another team member.

My Plan was not Without Flaws

I’ve made some good hires that fit the company and I’ve made some hires that were misfits.  As I said in my last newsletter about Clock Works, you must take swift action to release these misfits back into the sea to find something they excel at.  As for the clients, I had to take some counter measures to make sure they feel safe and important during our transition.

Actions I took on the Second Team Transition

To fix the erroneous hire, I made myself the contact for the clients experiencing a second transition in six months.  I then had the new hire work behind the scenes to ensure it was going to be a great fit.  Once that team member made it through the first set of month end reports, my manager and I decided whether it was a good fit.  Was this person working inside their genius “zone”? Once we had the right fit, then we introduced them to the clients.  In this way, I was able to save face and ensure we had the right team member, doing the right work, in the right portion.

Balancing team and clients will be an ongoing decision at Sooter Consulting.  However, we have discovered a way that all parties can feel safe and comfortable.

Be Productive When it comes to Business Issues

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Your manager breaks her leg playing softball and will be out for a month. Or your receptionist’s husband lands his dream job, but it’s out of state so they’ll be moving. When you own a small business, learning to expect the unexpected comes with the territory. Yet, you don’t have to stand idly by and wait for something to disrupt your finances and send you down a path of trouble. Consider being proactive with these troubleshooting tips.

Watch Your Numbers

You can monitor your company’s financial health, spot developing problems, and improve performance by reviewing key ratios derived from the numbers on your financial statements. Taken together, these ratios help paint a picture of your company’s financial well-being.

At times, you might dwell on problems in one particular aspect of your business. But don’t ignore the rest. If you’re not seeing the big picture, you might not spot trouble in other areas. For example, if your profit margin is falling, you could become so focused on trying to find a solution that you fail to notice that several of your biggest customers haven’t sent a payment lately and a cash flow problem is brewing.

Watch Your Assets

Always try to make the most of your assets. If you carry inventory, keep your eye on turnover rates. Slow inventory turnover can strain your cash flow. Figure out how many days’ worth of product you’d ideally like to have on hand, and adapt your purchasing to meet that goal. Also, check your fixed assets. If you have equipment that’s not being fully utilized, you may be able to repurpose it. If not, it may be time to sell or donate it.

Watch Your Debt

It’s practically impossible to operate a business without taking on at least some debt. Debt itself isn’t a problem, as long as you keep it under control. A high level of debt can eat up your cash, cut into your profits, and reduce the return you’re getting on your investment in the company — and that’s definitely trouble.

Rebalancing Your Team

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As Verne Harnish says in Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits, we need to get the right people, doing the right things, right.  Have you ever felt you have enough people on your team, but you are still overwhelmed by your own workload?  I have felt that way.  It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough help. It was that I didn’t have the “right” help.  I had to admit that I had failed to hire the right people.  It was now time to do the right thing for both the team member and I.  I needed to rebalance my team.

Mike Michalowicz writes in his book Clock Works, that we should take notice of our teams’ super strengths.  Are they in their “genius” zone?  We then need to take a microscopic look at our business needs.  Is our team’s “genius” zone and our business needs aligned?  Are we leaving talent on the table? 

Something that I’m still graveling with is that today’s work force doesn’t want to be pigeon hold into a traditional job description.  I like things neat and tidy – that’s why I make such a great bookkeeper.  I like when things are logical and ties out.  However, in this new climate, our team members want us to recognize that they can do task A in their job description AND task B in another job description.  It’s okay for them to mix and mingle tasks together to stay interested and connected with the company’s purpose and mission.

I encourage you to get to know your team’s strengths.  It is possible that you have something on your desk you need to “transfer” and a team member has that skill or desire to do that task.

Sometimes we find that we hired someone that just doesn’t “fit” in our company.  It is hard to do this kind of rebalancing, but I encourage you to be bold and courageous – Set them FREE.  You will not believe how much time and energy you have been wasting on the wrong fit.  Believe it or not, at some point they will come to appreciate that you had the courage to set them free.  They are released to find something that truly fulfills them.  Be sure to get legal counsel for this step – if you haven’t heard about legal shield, ask me – I’m happy to share my experience with them.

The Three T’s: Trim, Transfer and Trash

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The first thing I did was look at all the time I spent “deciding” for my team.  As a team we talked about how we can reduce the number of hours in the back and forth of making decisions.  I made a huge leap forward and did four things.  I gave them permission to make decisions.  I trust my team – I have hired some very smart people that just needed to know they had permission to do what it takes to get the job done.

In the process of discussing with my team, I asked how I can support them in making those decision by themselves. They all said they need more information.  When I was in the Clock Work Workshop back in January, Adrienne Dorison gave me some great ideas on how to provide that information.  My favorite was giving my team a guide line to follow or what she called “Guard Rails”.  For instants if you have a team member working on accounts receivable, you can give anyone a payment arrangement if they stay inside 45 days.  They no longer need to come to you if the client needs a 15-day extension and has always been a good paying client.

The next thing I did was work on instilling confidence in each member of my team.  When they made a decision using the guard rail or other methods we created, I have begun to praise them.  I must admit my Accounting Manager, Kathy, is so much better at this than I am – BUT – I make big efforts here to notice and praise a job well done.  It truly does help them make the next step in decision making without you.

Trim

Now that I have given permission, information and working on confidence boosting, I was able to do the first T – which is trim.  I trimmed away the time, energy and resources used to make decisions.  I had my whole team work on “trimming”.  I asked them to look at their process.  Is there something we can take away or minimize?

Transfer 

This is where I got the most time back for business development.  I promoted Kathy to do the supervising of the bookkeeping team.  She now does all the 1 2 1 meetings and communicating with them.  She coordinates schedules, trainings and work load.  You guested it – that put a huge hole in my day and gave me time to do things like write my own newsletters rather than buy “can” ones.

Trash 

I began with the most important question, is there a task that you can just stop doing?  After i asked myself this question, I found a very BIG time waster.  We use Asana for our project management system.  It tags the person doing the work and the team members following it.  I found that I was deleting emails from Asana for an hour a day.  Yikes… Why would I need Asana to tell me I completed a task that I just clicked off?  It may need to inform the next person in line that will work on the project, but not the person that just completed the task.  I took a few hours and removed ALL the tags that were unnecessary.  I knew that if I was spending an hour a day, then my team was also spending an hour a day.  That means I just got back 5 hours a day or 25 hours a week? No wait, that’s 100 hours a month back for actual work!  What can you eliminate? 

 

The Four D’s: Doing, Deciding, Delegating, and Designing

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According to Mike Michalowicz, the author of Clock Works, there are four types of work that we do each day.  The secret to a successful day is getting these four areas to an optimum level.

The Four Ds are:  Doing, Deciding, Delegating and Designing

The optimum mix of these areas are 80% doing, 2% deciding, 8% delegating and 10 % designing. It stands to reason that 80% of our time should be “doing” – delivering our product or services to our clients.  After all, without our clients, we really don’t have a business.

Decisions

If our businesses are set up with systems and procedures AND have given our team permission, information and the confidence to make decisions themselves, then really should not be doing much deciding for our business. This is where a lot of business owners get hung up.  We either think we are the only ones that can make important decisions for our business OR we don’t give our team enough information to make the decisions for themselves.  Is there a physical or virtual line by your office door? I’ve experience this at my office door and it makes it hard for me to actually do my “doing”.

The Art of Delegating

Don’t make the mistake I did and called it delegating. Instead think of it as being decision making in disguise.  Delegating is training your team member to do AND then letting them run with it.  Give them guard rails to make decisions on their own.  For example, if you have given someone the task of following up on your accounts receivable, give them a guard rail – call on our clients to collect, make payment arrangements if you think it’s a good idea, just keep things to 30 or 60 days.  Then only have them report back to you if something is going to fall outside the guard rail.  Trust that they have it.

Designing

Designing is another common topic in business development that you and I should be doing as the business owner.  I don’t know about you, but I opened my business because I liked the “doing” part of my business.  I love working on a QuickBooks file … getting it from a chaotic state to a well-organized file that brings clarity to my client.  However, as I have grown the business, I have become much more of a manager than a bookkeeper.  Now that I’ve promoted someone to manager, I find myself unsure of what I should do with my day.  OH… yes, I should be doing development work.  The problem with that is I’m much more comfortable reconciling a bank account than developing the business.  Are you hiding in your “doing” rather than designing?

We took the time analysis a step further and had our bookkeeping department do the analysis. We have some work to do to get us to the ideal range.  What about you?  What is your range?