For Immediate Release
April 13, 2012

Washington, DC – The Institute of Managment Consultants USA (IMC USA), announced that Andy Birol, Founder of Pittsburgh based Birol Growth Consulting (www.andybirol.com), will deliver the keynote address on October 6th 2012 in Orlando, Florida at IMC’s International Conference, “Grow.”  In his keynote, titled “Crossing the Consulting Valley of Death: Lessons and Learnings from a Lone Wolf,” he will share his personal lessons in recapturing success following business setback, breakdown, and trauma amidst financial meltdown, client bailout and family heartache. Through examples and anecdotes of setback, breakthroughs and belly laughs, Birol will describe how he navigated his 15 year-old business past these challenges and how he rediscovered his Best and Highest Use®.

Dr. Gayle Carson, CMC, CSP, Conference Co-Chair says, “I have known Andy for over 10 years and his knowledge, innovation, business acumen and genuine concern and care for his client is stellar.  He is the perfect example of how a one person boutique firm ca become a giant in the consulting industry.” 

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If you are more confused than ever as to if, when, and how the gas boom will impact your business, you are absolutely lucid and sober.  Every month brings new confusing signals and contradicting advances and setbacks. While the fundamentals aren’t changing, it is can be hard to reconcile the following:

Exciting Advances:

• Shell Corporation announces it will invest a $1 billion to build a cracker plant which will convert natural gas into plastics
• 7 coal-fired plants will be retired in WPA in anticipation of diminished reliance on coal
• Critical midstream pipelines to transport Marcellus gas across the US are being announced and funded.
• Governor Corbett signed the severance tax enabling PA municipalities to start benefitting from local gas well revenue.
• Shortages of housing, employees and skills continue to prove that the Marcellus footprint presents a short-term economic bonanza for those who can supply these scarce resources.

 Concerning Setbacks

• Seismic concerns in the form of tremors in Eastern Ohio have spurred deep concerns and unclear scientific responses from both pro- and anti-drilling parties.
• There is a huge glut of natural gas in WPA creating the world’s natural largest gas storage field with 13,000 dormant wells.
• Low domestic prices of natural gas (around $2.00) continue to be less than half the breakeven cost of production given current market conditions.
• Weak state and local governments in most Marcellus shale states and counties mean gas drillers must lead in setting standards and assuming risks, liability and public distrust. In other words, they can be damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
• Portions of eastern Ohio have instituted moratoriums on new drilling, but have not taken steps to resolve issues or questions to settle differences.

I am more bullish than ever on the potential for companies who don’t work in or even understand the energy business. Every company in the Marcellus footprint can and must decide how they can benefit from the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs entering our region on a yearly basis. My focus will continue to be on helping growing businesses that are twice removed from gas drillers, landowners and energy giants.

And my growing client base aside, many small businesses are catching on and figuring out how to benefit from the Marcellus Shale. At the Hart Energy Marcellus Midstream Conference, I saw:

• Urgi-centers, selling health care and testing, are actually loading their services onto “health RV’s capable of delivering care to visiting remote gas drilling sites and fracking ponds
• Rental home services. With housing in tight supply and non-existent in Greene County, realtors and other parties are getting creative. Fractional rentals and room-rental brokers are setting up shop.
• Websites like www.themarcellushale.com are springing up offering visibility and educational opportunities for any and all who want to grow and learn.
• Luxury Port-O-Johns for upscale energy customer/client events at gas well sites is also a booming business.

 So there is no silver bullet or straight line to opportunity in Marcellus but in anticipation of a future “Marcellus Lesson,” I am beginning to believe that the single biggest obstacle to growing a small business in the Marcellus Shale is the enormous clash between local and “outside business” culture. Specifically, how can a deeply proud and parochial region accept the inevitability of a profound, unstoppable economic change that brings both good and bad? In my workshops, interviews and client work, deep into rural areas in WV and PA, I have seen a level of distrust of outsiders as high as in any of the 68 countries I have visited.  Incoming businesses and interlopers who want to start, grow and run businesses must learn to understand and respect the local values and culture of these rural areas. This will continue to be a challenge and underestimated by many newcomers to the region. But just as importantly, local business owners, citizens and governmental leaders will find themselves needing to compromise and open their hearts as well. There is work to be done and I will write more about this in coming months. Keep focused on Marcellus and how you can grow your non-energy business because of the shale opportunity.

Does it really matter why you’re staying on to run your difficult business? Is it out of choice or desperation? If you can’t sell it now, or don’t see an immediate alternative that pays you well and provides a similar lifestyle, then your business must improve and you have to do it.So what can you do and how can you get started? Please consider my matrix with its four choices to scope out your situation and focus your energies on fixing your business. 

The BGC Growth/Sale Matrix:

As a re-committed business owner, consider your options. You could grow your business to keep it or sell it. And in doing so, you could focus accountability on your self as the owner or on the company and its management.

To help decide which of the four boxes you should focus your attention, please review my concept of Best and Highest Use here or simply remember:

Your personal and your firm’s Best and Highest Use® is:

1. Of all the things you do, what’s your Best and Highest Use® (BHU)
   
   1. What you like doing
   2. What you are good at doing
   3. What the market has valued in you and your firm
      
2. And again, what’s your firm’s BHU?
3. How can your firm focus on its BHU?
4. How can your firm leverage its BHU?

With this thinking, let’s revisit The BGC Growth/Sale Matrix and use your and your firm’s BHU to decide which box to focus on and emphasize to fix your company:

To elaborate on the four choices above:

A. You should grow and keep your business by personally devoting yourself to doing so. Your value to the firm is it’s primary reason for its success and your passion in running it and serving customers is very high.

B. Whether or not your customers value your own BHU, your marketplace values your company and it’s management. Fortify and invest in your management and what they need to grow your company.

C. You are not connected or in touch with what makes your company special or profitable. Fix what your company needs to thrive by bringing in professional managers, resources and solutions. Sell your company when your investment can be maximized and your company’s can grow no further with you at the helm.

D. Your staff is not growing your business and you need management talent and solutions your firm may not be able to afford. To make matters worse, your BHU may not be what the business needs to thrive. Consider bringing in an equity partner or reinvesting your retained earnings to beef up what needs to be fixed. Or sell the business as a “turnaround” and move on.

Recommitting to your business doesn’t have to be a decision that takes a lifetime to fulfill. But doing so successfully means taking decisive short-term steps and not straddling or suffering. Your clients, management and employees are counting on you to act responsibly and successfully. Fortunately you have wonderful choices and can make them quickly and based on your BHU and that of your management’s and company. And you can decide to grow it or sell it after you have fixed it.

“Birol quoted in The Washington Times on Marcellus and the opportunity it presents for small business”.

To read article click here.

If it is so wrong to stare at a car crash, then why are they so fascinating? And in these tough times, watching another crooked leader taking the “perp-walk of shame” brings a grin to even the most cordial of us. Leave it to the ever-precise Germans to define this feeling as “shadenfreude” or “the taking of pleasure in the misfortunes of others.” The more pompous or self righteous the civil servant, business titan, or do-gooder is, the more the French got it right, saying revenge is a dessert best enjoyed cold.

If shadenfreude is fun from a distance, why is it so painful to watch someone you care about become so impervious to their impact? It’s because we care. In my work, I have seen the following examples of owners breathing their own exhaust.

• After failing to eliminate his salesforce by going direct to customers, the leader invites the reps to “come back home as all is forgiven” by his marrying the youngest sales rep.
• Returning from France and bragging at work how much money he spent on wine, an owner cuts payroll and publicly borrows money from an employee.
• After kiting a client’s postal check and firing his partner’s son, the tables are turned when he alerts the sheriff who impounds the owner’s boat just as he’s skipping town on it.
• After showing off his new Ferrari, an owner takes me to his board room where he has taped (not framed) Penthouse centerfolds to the mahogany walls.

While the stories are horrifying, I can vouch for the good intentions and years of sacrifice that preceded each owner’s fall from grace. But at some point a chip switched in the owner’s head and the disconnection from reality snowballed down a slippery slope of complete self-delusion.

How can you tell if an owner’s ego and braggadoccicio have overwhelmed their confidence and conviction? What kinds of brakes and controls can you hope they embrace? It is high time when an owner

• Dismisses ideas as being irrelevant to their business when the ideas would create accountability
• Responds to questions regarding how their business is doing, by insisting there is no way to better it. Period.
• Believes that luck or being in the right place at the right time played no role in their success.

Business ownership has so little accountability and oversight that without devil’s advocates and contrarian data to strike a balance, dysfunction is likely. When owners start believing their destiny is assured, it’s more likely that things are never as good or as bad as they think they are.

Here are some simple questions to ask and assure their feet are on the ground and they are not breathing their own exhaust.

1. What is their true price of being wrong?
2. What is their true benefit of being right?
3. Where does their comfort zone really end?
4. Where does their dogma really begin?

In such crazy times, there seems to be a fine line between stoicism and irrationality. Help the owners you know to stay on the right side and remember my favorite quote, “We become what we tolerate!”

For the fourth time in 15 years I’m revamping my website.  My technology wingman groans, rolling his eyes and thinks, “Here he goes again.”

Why does the website that made me so proud a few years ago make me cringe? The reasons jump out at me:

It’s too complicated. The messaging isn’t clear, the back end doesn’t work, it’s not SEO-friendly, visitors are down and it’s not written in the right language. Length of stays is down, it’s not customizable, and, thanks to statistics on Google Analytics,  the website just isn’t doing the job.

I ask experts and gurus, “What’s your latest thinking on effective websites? What’s working?”  The avalanche of ideas and advice I hear only makes things worse.

“Get your reader engaged”…”Crowdsource”…”Give away your value.”…”Tweet, tweet tweet!…”Improve your Klout score!”…Like everything you can on Facebook and you will be liked back”…Your Face book must talk to your blog which talks to your LinkedIn”… “Put ads on your site”… ”Reciprocally link”…”Update your meta tags”…. “Fool Google…”First page or fail!”…“Get people to talk about you!”

With a sense of déjà vu, I freeze up. I can’t move ahead or accept my website for what it is and isn’t. If I upgrade my website, I know I face thousands of dollars and worse yet, a hundred hours invested only to be no further ahead than where I am today.

I ask clients, referral sources, friends and family, “What do you think of my site?” I hear platitudes like: “It’s so informative.” “There’s so much great content.” You’ve   done so much.” The worst is, “I was going to hire you anyway.”

I know I have to change my site or accept that websites are nothing more than billboards and content giveaways for a professional-services firm.

Then it hits me. All I ever wanted from my site was to provoke and qualify prospects into having a live conversation with me.

My business, like most conceptual services, only works when I have a conversation with a prospect who shares his or her goals and challenges with me. Website hits, visits, click-throughs, registrations, follows, likes or joins don’t really matter unless they create that conversation.

I went back to the roots about how my prospects hire me, how they build trust with me and their typical buying behavior in hiring me. For every 10 conversations, I can generate five meetings, three proposals and close one sale.  And I have decided to build my new website simply to do this.

I can already hear experts scoffing, designers and social media mavens who preach the building of customer engagements, social friendliness and website stickiness. Frankly, I just don’t care. If my strategy generates 10 conversations a month but everyone else thinks it’s a bust, I’ll be pleased.

My business goal is to keep failing in new and different ways, and frankly I haven’t tried this before. And how much worse could it do?  But maybe this time, I’ll be saying, “WWWW: Why Website’s Work Wonderfully!”

Background: Microseeps is a lab testing business located in Harmar, Pennsylvania that provides a wide variety of services supporting insight into soil and groundwater problems. Since the 90’s, the company has solved a large number of customers’ needs by developing innovative, groundwater, analytical tools and cost-effective ways to sample soil gas for vapor intrusion.

The Challenge: Although Microseeps was experienced in serving large, energy firms responsible parties, consultants and labs throughout the United States, the company lacked a shale-gas offering or specific sales effort dedicated to directly serving small customers in the Marcellus Shale footprint running through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. The firm typically serves consultants and customers who call Microseeps technical and customer support for solutions. After analysing sales and laboratory results, however, management saw a new market opportunity emerging — the local independent testing lab.  But without a sales force, or dedicated products or services, how could Microseeps evolve to serve this dispersed target market?

The BGC Solution

Andy Birol helped Microseeps conduct field, market and internal company research and analysis. Then, Tom Hill, Owner agreed to launch and fund a direct-marketing effort with online and off-line tactics to directly engage with state-approved laboratories across the quad-state Marcellus shale footprint.

“This was a big step for our company to aggressively market to a specific target prospect. We are excited to introduce this unique offer that fully leverages our companies Best and Highest Use,” said Hill, adding, “Andy guided us to discover how we could enter this market, and implement the right steps to further grow our Marcellus business.”

Specifically, Microseeps is developing an integrated. direct-mail, email, telephone and website strategy that offers an easy and profitable solution for any lab to grow its Marcellus business, whether or not it has existing business or experience serving land owners, corporations, drillers or municipalities impacted by the drilling of gas.  Beyond these tactics, Microseeps is taking further steps to support its business in this space.

Results to date.

Microseeps has already grown its Marcellus related business segment with existing customers by more than 25 percent. And the new tactics promise to easily double this growing number in this emerging market. More important, early results demonstrate that a focused effort has made a sales impact and has given management the confidence to create more proactive initiatives.

“With a great year behind us and our new Marcellus and other initiatives under way, I have high confidence that the coming years will continue to be some of Marcellus’s best,” says Hill.

“Andy Birol has been of great help not just in terms of developing our Marcellus initiative, but in helping us to refocus Microseeps on creating profitable growth for years to come. I look forward to a positive ROI on his and our efforts for years to come.”

Congratulations, your business has survived the recession! Thanks to your leadership, you held off the banks, reduced your debt, collected your receivables and delivered great products and service.

Today, your firm runs lean, with loyal customers and reasonable profits. So what should you do next? Are you satisfied, dissatisfied or neither? Should you grow your business or should you sell it?

Asking your advisors doesn’t make your choice any clearer. They declare your business is worth less now than before the recession, but not as much as it could be in five years. But to recharge your business you’ll have to refocus your efforts and reinvest some of your wealth back into your firm. Can you? Should you? How do you decide whether to grow or sell your business?

After working with hundreds and speaking with thousands of business owners, I am convinced the decision to grow or exit your firm means reconciling and aligning your personal and business goals. Here’s how:

• Decide on Your Personal Goals
• Needs: What type of income, validation and purpose do you need?
• Lifestyle: Do you live to work or work to live?
• Legacy: Has your business accomplished what you personally set out to do?
• Pinpoint Your Business Goals
• Life cycle: Is your business at its peak or trough?
• Best and Highest Use: Has your business fully exploited or squandered its value.
• Potential: Can you or someone else take your business to the next level?

After you’ve developed an objective list, you may not be any closer to the root issue. Just like a defining point drove you to start, buy or revive your business, you may need a defining point to help you decide if you will grow or sell your business.

Clarifying your defining point

Remember Popeye the Sailor Man (and original Zen master) standing up to Bluto, spluttering, “That’s all I can takes, ‘cause I can’t takes no more”? That’s what a defining point feels like.

As a business owner, you’re probably highly self-motivated, but do you know what got you started or keeps you going? Was it a flash realization or a series of events? What led to your decision to grow your own business, overcome obstacles, and ultimately succeed? Answer these questions to narrow down your defining point:

• When did it occur?
• How did you know what it was?
• Since it occurred, what do you now know and do?
• Since it occurred, what do you no longer believe or do?
• How does your defining point give you confidence?

Identifying this source of conviction is the first step toward growing your business, because it will power your commitment to implement the knowledge, behaviors, and tools of successful owners. Clarifying your defining point will also help to reconcile your business, family, health, and other life challenges in a way that works for you. How can it accomplish so much?

Passion can be mistaken for blind faith, and blind faith has killed many businesses. (Okay, it’s built some really good ones, too, but let’s go with the odds.) The point is this: You need to know your limits. Astute owners balance knowing they can implement, sell, and deliver new ideas with the pragmatic necessity to make money. Avoid any new venture before taking a hard look at what you can sacrifice in terms of cash, time, people, and other resources. Otherwise, your conviction is really just wishful thinking.

Looks like you’ve made it

For years, I’ve seen venture capitalists and other financial gamers flail about in the ocean of ownership. I’m convinced that few of these financial intermediaries make great owners. They generally lack passion about what they sell. They talk about things like roll ups, cash outs, and other financial gimmicks, but don’t focus on delighting their customers, living their products and services, and standing behind everything they sell. Likewise, corporate players who try to cut and paste corporate tactics into a new business don’t experience the freedom or the success involved with building a company brick-by-brick on the strength of an owner’s distinctiveness.

Whatever their background, winners discard the trappings, the ego, and the support mechanisms and get, what owning a business is all about—delivering customer value.

Are these guys lucky? Do they possess a Midas touch that turns decisions into profits? Absolutely not. Their magic is the self-confidence that stems from believing in their companies. Their triumphs are the living, breathing examples of their core conviction that as business owners, they each control their own destiny through the passion and conviction they either do or don’t possess.

You can’t file conviction in a drawer and move on to the next challenge because, as your firm grows, the issues, concerns, and crucial decisions you face will evolve. The conviction of a rookie entrepreneur looks nothing like the conviction of an owner of a multi-million dollar company. Yet, however big a firm becomes, it never outgrows its foundation. An owner’s commitment, confidence, and conviction remain the crucial drivers of a company’s success.

Self-check: Ambivalence

Ambivalence is to the business owner what salty food is to an obese smoker with undiagnosed high blood pressure—a silent killer. Check the following symptoms to find out whether you are ambivalent. Do you agree with any of the following statements?

• My products or services aren’t all that effective.
• My customers don’t really deserve the best.
• My employees are replaceable.
• Sure, I can cut corners. Who’ll notice?
• What, me lead? My people know what to do. Leadership doesn’t really matter.

A “yes” answer to one or more of these statements indicates some level of ambivalence.

Whether our businesses are in transition, succession, growing organically or through acquisition, we owners all share a common standing. Once we’re recognized as business owners, we never want to go back to work for someone else. In our independence, we all belong to the one club that even Groucho Marx would want to stay in.

The freedom, affirmation and respect we encounter is difficult to replicate in the corporate world. And even if it does, it usually comes with strings attached. So it’s not surprising that the drive to protect what we’ve created could be the professional equivalent of a mother’s devotion to her child’s well being.

On the one hand, we fear the downside of failure, on the other, we yearn for all the opportunities we could be missing. How can we protect what we’ve earned, invest in new opportunities and avoid the clear threats our businesses face? These dilemmas torment many owners. How many times have you seen examples like these?

• A successful security alarm company ignores the clear trend toward smart homes and integrated home-theatre systems only to discover that these providers are now competitors as they include security alarms as part of their command and control systems.
• A maturing accountancy, searching for new services with better margins, starts offering executive search and outplacement. Instead of embracing these added services, their clients grow confused and wary, when even the partners struggle to explain why and how these different offerings work together.
• A computer cabling company moves seamlessly from connecting servers to setting up wireless connectivity. Their customers are grateful and even more loyal to their cabling company for shepherding them from obsolescence to state of the art.

In the final analysis, your role as a successful business owner may come down to two conceptual duties: demanding more predictability of your existing business and honing your skill in scouting out your environment.

You know you demand greater predictability from your existing business when you:

• Aren’t happy with great results until you know how they happened
• Become intolerant of erratic swings in sales or profitability and refuse to blame only the economy, competition, suppliers or customers for bad results
• Demand that successful activities in your firm be repeated, rewarded and routinized, and surprises become anticipated and eliminated.

You know you are becoming an expert scout of your environment when you can:

• Anticipate what your customers, employees and vendors will demand and already have a solution that meets their needs and yours.
• Interpret the difference between what your target market says it wants and have the confidence to offer them what they need.
• Look ahead at least three months and anticipate what your business will need in terms of sales, cash, expertise, and time to meet your goals.

For most business owners, growing a business is the fulfillment of their life’s work and dreams. When your business is growing, you feel in control of your destiny. The decision to sell or further grow your business comes down to where you stand on keeping your business growing in the right direction.

If you are still full of conviction to make it more predictable and to continue to scout out your environment you should stay in your business and grow it. If not, you should sell it.

If you need further help, contact me at 412 973 2080 and I have a questionnaire I can step you through to create the confidence and conviction you need to decide if you should sty or you should go!

©Birol Growth Consulting 2012 all rights reserved.

As a stakeholder in a tech company, you have your money, future or ego in its future. Whether you own, buy from, or sell to such a firm, its hype should be contagious but could be a double-edged sword. Are you in on the ground floor of the “next big thing” or will your stake be wiped out by the next disruptive technology? Industry pundits who define success in terms of “digital immigrants”, “hyper-personalization” and “virtualization” aren’t very helpful! So how can you tell whether your tech firm is chicken-salad or chicken-scratch?

Here are three steps to decide if and how your technology company could succeed.

1.  Is your firm’s product or service really a feature, a benefit or an advantage (FBA)?

•  Features are the functions, specs or characteristics defining how a product or service performs. Apple’s touch-screen technology is a good example.

•  Benefits are how the features help the user/buyer. The Garmin portable GPS has evolved from a beneficial product

•  Advantages are what value the benefits provide the user/buyer

2.  How can FBA’s help you define your tech firm’s focus?

•  A feature-driven company should offer a function or tool that enables something greater to work better.

•  A benefit-driven firm should sell a capability which enables its user/buyer to pursue an outcome

•  An advantage-driven firm should market an ultimate condition or outcome to a user/buyer

3.  Which markets, investors or ultimate buyers are best for your tech company?

•  A feature-driven tech firm has the most appeal to vendors/suppliers of a greater or broader solution

•  A benefit-driven company should target its product/service at end-user/buyers who will leverage it into the most profitable outcomes or value for its customers

•  An advantage-driven company is most valuable to the final user/consumers who enjoy the most immediate value or highest outcome from this complete product/service.

Whether your technology firm is “pre-revenue” or “self-funding” you are proud of it and its future.

Business people are fascinated by the benefits, profits and potential of technology. Just visit any tech event and witness the financiers, service providers and the media networking with techies to discover “the next business thing.”

But despite all this “technology-transfer”, why isn’t there more technology in business? After 15 years of consulting with more than 430 firms and presenting to or interviewing another 10,000 business leaders, I’m dismayed by how little technology actually makes it into most mainstream, medium and small businesses:

• Most inventories are still managed without RFID or other systems tied into the POS. Despite this decade-old technology being “so easy,” I still see many companies doing it by hand.

• Few companies have good CRM systems. While this software works, few customers integrate their systems with their own sales culture and process or ensure sales force commitment, crippling many users from benefitting from such new technology.

• True cost-accounting information is scarce. Ask business owners what their product or service really costs to make, sell and service and few honestly know. If they had more knowledge, they could more confidently limits test new offers and features.

• Knowledge businesses still communicate with tools from the 1900′s. Despite the many better ways to present and engage their audiences, the gap between what companies say they sell and what customers hear and buy remains enormous. Too few businesses are developing mobile apps or distance learning.

Here’s why there isn’t more technology in business:

• The culture of technology clashes with mainstream business. The technology culture values perfection of their means while mainstream business struggles to convert these means into profitable ends.

• Tech people are schooled to woo investors and grants not to sell to customers. Inventors and startups believe they must write plans to get financing before they approaching and selling customers. Customers need to be understood and served but investors want to be bought out and move on. Who is more important to business longevity?

• Associations and business-plan contests reward planning skills not results. Our schools, associations and governments reward techies more for their thinking than for their sales and profits.

• Social media often encourages engagement without closure. Blogging and tweeting without closing business is like having a fiancé for five years without a marriage.

Why should you in the technology community react or even care? Because mainstream businesses need you, your value and they have money to pay you.

Consider these 3 ways to help you put more of your technology in business:

• Make your “thing” work manually before you try to make it work with technology.

• Understand how your customers use your thing to make money, and whether it’s by selling more, spending less, saving time, reducing risk or improving their lifestyles.

• Sell some version of your product or expertise from the start while you seek investors.

Technology companies have big shoes to fill in sustaining the Western Pennsylvania economy beyond steel. Doing so takes driving their products and services deeply into mainstream business.

Through this column, I will provide you with ways and ideas to do so. Together, we can put more of your technology into business.