When Leadership Pittsburgh offered me the chance to witness live police work, I jumped at the chance and chose Pittsburgh’s highest crime zone on a Saturday night, graveyard shift.  Arriving at midnight just hours after two murders in the precinct was jarring, but the sergeant’s calm, terse orders gave me no time to reflect.  After roll call, I was introduced to my officer and we drove off in response to nonstop calls about gunshots, domestic violence, armed intruders, crack-addict beatings, fugitive surveillance and after-hour gang hangouts. Amid the adrenaline, false alarms, driving into forbidding alleys and criminal behaviors, I was struck at the incredible judgment an officer must have just to stay safe and work effectively. Here are 5 lessons I learned that apply to all our businesses.

1.    Confidence is survival. Watching all the officers in action is a primer on courage. Every stop is dangerous, and one cop remarked that he feels there is a 60% chance he will be hurt or worse each shift. “You can’t show fear or you will be hurt on the job,” he said. “But you can be afraid and then you can confront it.” As business owners operating in risky times we all need to balance confidence and conviction with objectivity and perspective.

2.   Fighting insurmountable odds means setting boundaries. When working as a team, officers must prioritize which 911 calls to cover first. Covering a horseshoe-shaped territory requires coordinating who’s first, second and third on the scene. This maximizes officer safety, response time, situation assessment and quick reassignment to the next call. How can and should your business respond to challenges and opportunities?

3.    Errors of omission mean life or death. Errors of commission mean punishment. Forgetting which gangs, after-hours bars and meth labs are “running hot” spells certain trouble for an officer. Misjudging a domestic disturbance call can mean disciplinary action. Experience on the job enables an officer to categorize mistakes and make fewer and fewer of them.  How does your staff make mistakes and react to your rules?

4.    Work with what you have. Officers don’t let their lack of resources compromise their abilities. Old vehicles and communications technology are facts of life but texting and personal cell phones provide adequate work-arounds. As business owners, all of us  are used to working without all that we need. Are you aware of all the ways your staff gets their jobs done?

5.    Communicate, communicate, communicate! You can manage adrenaline and fear by checking with your teammates. It takes only ten seconds to get a second opinion or plan a better response from a trusted peer. How much trust has your staff built with and without you?

Police work in a crime zone is a study in watching expert human beings react and respond to symptoms of dangerous, intractable problems. Without the resources to resolve the root causes, these fine men and women learn how to rely on each other and stay alive so they can help whom they are able to as much as they can. Passing  judgement on their performance without understanding the context for the decisions they make is impossible from a distance.  As a business owner, the biggest lesson I took away from this unforgettable night is how critical it is to always gain and respect field knowledge from those who have it.

Thank you, Pittsburgh’s finest!

It happens too often.

You launch a new product, service, sales initiative, or marketing program with fanfare and high expectations.

As soon as the kickoff is over, your eyes turn to results. At first, sales trickle in. Then the trickle becomes drizzle. But the downpour never comes.

The program is neither a success nor a failure, but the market response did not meet expectations. These questions remain unanswered:

• Do we have the right product or service?
• Have we positioned it correctly?
• Are we packaging, promoting, and pricing it correctly?
• Do we have the right market?
• Are we selling it correctly?

While your staff will answer these questions with the best of intentions, you are left with the same dilemma: fish or cut bait. Do you reinvest to find out if the initiative can be successful or cut your losses now? Financial analysis only helps so much. Sure, breakeven analysis and return on investment are important tools, but their assumptions will kill you because there is no historical data.

So it comes down to your judgment: “Do I kill the effort or let it ride?” In making further investments, there is another fear. What if, after further effort, the results are still inconclusive?

Here are five steps to evaluate any new product, service, or program initiative:

1. Reconfirm the objectives and sales or marketing process of the initiative.
   Are they realistic? Many initiatives in business fail because expectations weren’t set, agreed upon, and met. Sales and marketing efforts often fail due to forecasts based on market ignorance or under-funding based on the need to limit risk. If the goal is finding, keeping, or growing customers, clarify this. Or, if the goal is creating more leads, reorders or referrals, make it clear. Otherwise, results are hard to predict or see.
2. Require the champion and the implementers of the initiative to demonstrate a model for needed success.
   Too often, the visionary who developed the idea is not as experienced in implementing it, or vice versa. In fact, it may not even be the same person. Demand a clear model for success.
3. Establish probabilities of success.
   This is where judgment, intuition, and previous experience converge. Bring your team together and agree on the probability of expected results.
4. Set up a field “test-kitchen” to demonstrate the required success.
   Stack the deck in one of the following ways: pick a great sales territory, simple product version, or traditional sales tactic and test your initiative. If it is not successful, let it go. Be ruthless in preventing “scope creep” of the test, and stay committed to seeing it through.
5. Pick a drop-dead date or event.
   At a certain point you must make a decision. Choose a moment in time or define a reaction by the marketplace and let this be the finish line.

Tests like this always force a decision. They should not take longer than two or three months and frankly, in Internet time, can occur much more quickly. The burden of the questionable initiative is that it saps the financial and human resources of an organization, creating dissension and finger pointing. Sometimes it’s better to cancel a promising initiative than to watch it malinger.

And maybe the timing is the problem — it’s just not right for your organization this time.

Before the financial crisis, most businesses could coast along and rely on their credit lines to make up for shortfalls in sales.

“Good” customers could be subsidized and customers who didn’t pay or went under could be ignored by just borrowing more cash. For the firm, slumping quarterly revenues and rising expenses could be carried forward by financial wizardry and leveraging a balance sheet.

While the lessons of doing business without credit and cutting expenses to the bone have been learned, how can one grow a business back to where it was and forward after the financial crisis? Without fads like buyouts, rollups and ESOPs, an owner, financier or organization should return to the oldest source of creating growth in the book. Sell more products and services and do so at a profit.

Why Profitable Growth Now? by Andy Birol

Profitable sales means focusing on:

• Higher gross margins from differentiating your value and de-commoditizing your products and services profitably
• Knowing that every sale you make is profitable by customer, order item or services
• Managing your balance sheet for liquidity instead of credit where the biggest assets are customers’ predictable purchases.
• Creating a wealthy company that can be sold for cash and secure the lifestyle of its owners now and later.

Profitable Growth is not a fad, or just a program to get by in the short term, but a way thinking about your business, investment or organization. It starts with knowing who is paying you for what value and continuously working to repeat this. It is a pay-as-you-go approach to growing your business that reduces dependence on borrowing money, and increases the wealth of a company and the security of its owners and all who rely on it.

Whether your business has major growth or returning to growth in its plans, this blog will focus on the tools, techniques and real-world examples for creating Profitable Growth!