Legacy Lessons from Rock Legends
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Recently I lived the dream of every rock music fan: For four and a half days my friends and I sailed on the MS Legend Of The Seas alongside 27 classic rock bands who played nonstop on three separate stages. And sailing with 3,400 like-minded baby-boomer fans alongside our rock heroes created an instant community relishing the soundtrack of our lives.
What did I see, listen and learn from bands whose prime passed 30 years ago? Seeing rock leaders sustain their talents and keep performing for their fans inspired me to consider how business owners can do it too. If you wonder how you can keep on thrilling your next generation of customers, who like, rock fans may not even have been alive when you first got started, here are my five lessons and implications for your business along with some great concert photos courtesy of my friend Vickie Sullivan.
1. Keep your band performing like the headliners they once were. Paul Rogers of Bad Company, Free and The Firm struts and delivers a great show as if he was at Madison Square Garden.
- Implication for you. Passionately believe in your business’s value and keep delivering it powerfully and perpetually.
2. Ensure your band always has an inspired front man. When Foreigner’s leader Mick Jones replaced his lead signer Lou Gramm with young Terry McDermott, he saved the band and added decades to its life.
- Implication for you. When your business leadership requires you to replace founding members with energetic stars, put your business’s needs ahead of its past.
3. Love your core fans and they will create the next generation. The Marshall Tucker Band are the masters at drawing their audiences into their music. After hearing their leader Doug Gray tell their story, you want to sing his band’s praises as much as their songs.
- Implication for you. Your business undoubtedly has customers who care for you above and beyond just what they buy from you. Remember them and you’ll see cheerleaders you didn’t dream you still had.
4. Assume it’s all about you and you can lose your legacy. We can accept that our idols are getting old, but cannot listen to them live in their past instead of connecting to us in our present. Watching Black Oak Arkansas’ self-indulgent behavior onstage was off-putting.
- Implication for you. Double-check your business isn’t banking on its history but is building on its current successes to serve its customers in the future.
5. Classic fans know your band; new audiences want your hits. Rolling Stones’ saxophonist Bobby Keys, surrounded himself with a fresh young band and delivered his timeless songs like “Brown Sugar,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” “Whatever Get’s You Through The Night,” and “Delta Lady” as if he was still playing with Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Joe Cocker.
- Implication for you. Project your business legacy and value forward through new channels and voices. Your voice will be recognized as the founder as it carries on loud and clear!
For many of us, the music of the 70’s and 80’s is the soundtrack of our lives. As I watched Bachman and Turner sing “Taking Care of Business” it stirred me to recall my loves, triumphs, and challenges and then to think about you, my clients and your needs. As they play their hearts out in their later years, let’s be inspired by their legends and lessons as we EXTEND our business legacies!
Marcellus Is Waiting for Your Technology
Filed under: Business Growth, Marcellus, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
With all the hoopla about the Marcellus Shale, no one has talked about the role technology has played in making Marcellus a reality. It’s time someone did.
The fact is, without technology, the opportunities Marcellus has spawned would never exist. In all the talk about the cracking technology that drives natural gas extraction, we’ve overlooked that cracking came as a monumental, technological breakthrough.
But more to the point. It’s now time to hone in on how you can inject your technology into the Marcellus opportunity. And the best way to do this is to understand Marcellus not as a single, monolithic opportunity, but as three tiers of opportunity—direct, indirect, and induced. Look at it this way and you can find a way to inject your technology into serving this emerging-energy marketplace on your terms.
Let’s first take a look at how you can target the tier-one, direct opportunity, admittedly the riskiest of these three tiers.
In a recent conversation with the heads of supply-chain management for Seneca, Chesapeake and Range Resources, they all insisted that new vendors must first address a proven need they already have and then fill out a Master Service Agreement (MSA) before they can do business in the energy sector. Generally, a Master Service Agreement specifies generic terms like payment terms, product warranties, intellectual property ownership, dispute resolution, and the like.
They further emphasized that those vendors who stand the best chance of successfully entering the Marcellus market will:
- Focus on their Best and Highest Use (BHU). This means concentrating on what they do best, what they like to do, and what a market values and pays them for.
- Build on their customer base and not try to be a total-solution provider
- Avoid trying to grow too fast, if doing so risks jeopardizing their service levels.
- Under sell and over deliver.
One of the speakers also let it slip that if you’re going to serve the energy industry, you have to be ready to work at three in the morning, if needed, and to be on call and on-demand as if you’d been hungering for months to secure the piece of business you land
This tells me that an opportunity can exist for you to be ready to breakthrough with your disruptive technology if and when another vendor slips. That’s when you’ll most likely be able to leapfrog over any existing MSA and serve a client who needs you and will work with you.
Nonetheless, if you insist on going after the big boys, then keep reminding them of FUD–Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The more you convince a purchasing agent of the downside of not solving their problem by going with your services, the more likely you are to appeal to their inclination to avoid personal career risk.
Next time, I’ll discuss the less risky opportunities in the indirect and induced tiers, where more opportunities exist for your technology.
WWWW: Why Worthy Websites Work
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
My recent article for TEQ WWWWW: Why Don’t Wonderful Websites Work?, spelled out why my new website, would ignore the best advice of website gurus and would focus purely on generating conversations with visitors.
Well, I ate my own dog food and did what I told you I would. I created a blog–based website. It has no other purpose than to make it easy for visitors to qualify me, self-qualify themselves, get to content of value, and contact me. My new tag line for businesses is: Run it. Grow it. Fix it. Sell it.
The new site features case studies and success stories for three, tightly defined target markets–business owners, advisors, and meeting planners.
I made the centerpiece of the site the Growth Potential Index (GPI), a free, confidential, instant, non-promotional assessment visitors can complete. As they do, they self- profile themselves and demonstrate their interest in needing help.
My new website has been up only for three weeks, so I don’t know for sure how it’s going work. I’m told it’s too soon to tell. The spiders and crawlers haven’t yet picked it up. And I’ve chosen not to invest in keywords or other more traditional means to make the site sticky.
Instead, I use the native content that Google valued so deeply on my previous site because of my 500 articles. This approach propelled my former site to first-page status without any investment in keywords, clicks, or other artificial methods.
Thus far, I’m getting a steady flow of business owners who engage with me by taking the GPI. Their engaging with this tool gives me information I would otherwise lack on how they score on five criteria. For example:
- Best And Highest Use (BHU): Owners’ average confidence that they are focused on their own BHU is at the 53rd percentile.
- Personally Indispensable: 50% of business owners consider themselves personally indispensable to their businesses. The other 50% say that they are not.
- Focused Business: Nearly two thirds of owners report that their businesses are sufficiently focused on the right opportunities.
- Alignment: Surprisingly, owners’ average confidence level stands at the 56th percentile that their businesses are aligned with their own Best and Highest Use.
- Demand for Their BHU: Owners are at the 63rd percentile of confidence that the market will continue to demand their firm’s Best and Highest Use.
Website experts, designers, and social-media mavens may scoff. But frankly, I don’t care. If my strategy generates 10 conversations a month with business owners that I can turn into three meetings and close one sale, I’ll be pleased. Stay tuned.
I Promised to Build You a New Website
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Last March in my article WWWWW, I promised to build you a new website where you could quickly see and take advantage of my free value and then contact me to chat for more of my no-obligation help. With much thanks to Ricardo Rodriquez, Adam Paulisick, Kevin Grainger, Hank Walshak, and Fred Dugach, it’s ready for you! Here are some FAQ’s if you’re just wondering.
Q. Andy; what happened to your original website www.andybirol.com?
I liked your 500 articles, 180 newsletters and videos?
A. www.andybirol.com is and will always be available for your reference purposes. My new site www.birolgrowthconsulting.com sits “in front” and you can always link to www.andybirol.com for my library of content.
Q. What’s your refocused message?
A. I help established business owners run, fix and grow their companies so that they can keep or sell them when and how they choose. I also help business advisors and associations to empower their clients and members to profitably grow their businesses.
Q. What’s behind your “Run, Fix, Grow, Sell” philosophy?
A. If you own, advise or host owners of an established business, is it worth what it was in 2008? Can you sell it for what you need to? Do you have the mojo to recommit yourself to creating the profitable growth your business needs so you can sell it when and how you want? Intrigued? Click here.
Q. Andy, I want to suggest an improvement, pinpoint a typo or give you feedback but WIIFM? (What’s In It For Me)
A. If you find a typo, suggest an improvement or just give me your feedback at EMAIL ANY, I will send you a free electronic copy of my book, Accelerating Your Business.
With All the Business in Technology, Where’s the Technology in Business?
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
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.
Get Your Loving at Home; He’s No Hugger!
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you cut out all extra service and personal touches from your business? Would customers still come if you were excellent but detached? My recent shoulder surgery was an in-your-face experience of how this works.
After enduring shoulder pain for a year, an MRI confirmed that my rotator cuff was ripped apart. I found Pittsburgh’s best surgeon, and after a 15-minute consult, he booked me. 90 days later, I arrived for the surgery, and was quickly processed, IV’d, gurneyed and staged for the operation. No visit from the surgeon, little small talk from the nurses, and no remorse for their 2-hour delay in pre-op.
When I objected, they sedated me to ensure my compliance and placed me in the queue. The surgeon never visited before or after the procedure, and three hours after the operation, I was sent home to heal. A week later I had my ten-minute follow-up with the surgeon. Running out of time with more questions to ask, I tempted him with the only lure I had. I suggested that he operate on my other shoulder. At this, he gave me another ten minutes, satisfied all my concerns, and recommended scheduling the next one before the summer.
How did this make me feel? Am I a happy customer? What business lessons did I take away from this experience?
I am happy with my surgeon and the results to date. Yes, I felt deprived until I accepted that when it comes to surgery, I’d better get my loving at home. My surgeon and the procedure have my highest recommendation. If anyone needs a shoulder surgeon, call me at 412-973-2080, and I’ll put you in contact with the best one I know.
So what lessons can we learn on running our businesses in a cost-constrained marketplace where raising prices or offering more value is impossible? How do you provide your value when your market won’t pay you for it?
• If you offer a small part of the total package your customer is buying (surgery vs. a fully recovered shoulder), you must be efficient at delivering the only part you can.
• If you have to run a high-volume operation, focus all your resources on maintaining quality and efficiency at the highest volume possible and cut out any and all distractions.
• Spend your non-delivery time on generating more customers.
• Have faith that factors you can’t control — like physical therapy and patient commitment to rehabilitation — will make your work (surgery) speak for itself.
Many years ago, when I was a corporate manager, I sat in on an esprit de corps meeting during which a furious debate ensued over the impact of some corporate policy on how some employees might feel. After listening to this debate, my favorite executive stood up and said with exasperation, “For God’s sake, they can get their loving at home, we run a business here.”
Perhaps there’s a lesson for many of our businesses. Despite every efforts we make to cushion and enhance the experience we offer, sometimes it’s only about focusing on your best and highest use and letting your customers meet their other needs on their own.
Assess Corporate Culture When Choosing Your Next Customer
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
It is standard practice to qualify a prospect on the basis of time, need, authority and money, but why not by corporate culture as well? We all find it easier to work with some companies just as we prefer working with some employees more than others. In fact, as a result of outsourcing, with more and more work going to suppliers instead of employees, perhaps the supplier-customer relationship should (and will) start to mimic the employee-employer relationship.
If this is so, then as suppliers, we should start to assess our prospect’s corporate culture just as we did when deciding to accept a company’s job offer. While I’m not recommending pre-relationship psychological testing, we may need to run a relationship check just as we would a credit check. Since people still buy from people (as opposed to companies) some level of compatibility is essential. After all, customer-supplier relationships fail most often because expectations were not set, agreed upon and then met. Some relationships may be already doomed from the start!
So let’s take a few moments and decide whether we are picking good long-term partners or “one-time sales stands.”
- Does the decision-maker communicate like you do?
- Does he/she share some basic values with you?
- Does his/her company make decisions like yours does?
- How are disputes resolved, if they are resolved?
- Is it a conservative or progressive environment in terms of risk-taking, communications, problem solving, partnering?
While sales goals have to be hit, they are rarely accomplished through the first order. Therefore, developing an ideal customer profile before closing that first deal will help ensure that more will follow. Taking a few minutes when moving qualified prospects through the developed or proposal funnel stage before closing them will only enhance the chances of successful long-term partnerships. This profile can easily be added as part of your qualifying customer or pre-proposal questionnaire. Feel free to contact me if you would like some further thoughts on how to do this.
Connecting Engagement to Profitable Growth
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
For years, I have wrestled with what role social media role really plays in creating profitable growth and wrote a rowdy piece for AMEX on it here. But building relationships or “engagement marketing” is critical to creating profitable growth. And recently, when Constant Contact asked me to speak at their engagement conference on profitable growth, I presented the following 5 findings:
Five Key Findings
1. Customer Engagement
+ Your Firm’s Value
==============================
Profitable Growth in the New Economy
It is nice to chat online with communities and prospects, but it is crucial to speak in terms of your firm’s value and expertise. Whimsical topics may generate awareness and interest, but they must create live conversations where buyers can build interest and take action that leads to closed business and your profitable growth? Just like in marriage, unless engagement leads to committed customers it’s a waste of time and effort.
2. To ensure your engagement efforts generate profitable growth:
- Do your math. Determine your how many engaged prospects you must generate and how many of these you must convert into buyers to make your money.
- Focus your engaged prospects on your Best and Highest Use (BHUTM.) When you know your firm’s BHU and inject this into your conversations, your best prospects will respond to you in these terms.
- Convert customer engagement into profitable growth. Budget your engagement activities all the way through to your profitability.
3. Confirm that your engaged customers stay profitable.
• Measure exactly how much money your engaged customers are spending.
• Track your cost of engagement and never let it exceed customer profits.
4. Watch and ensure that your profitably engaged customers are paying you:
• Measurably and predictably
• Because of your social media/marketing
• Based on your firm’s value
5. Discover the specific ways how profitably engaged customers are paying you:
• They buy samples, trials, assessments and diagnoses
• Then they buy more
• And they refer your company to their peers who do the above
Customer engagement is a new word for building relationships, which is as critical as it is imperative. But social media and networking, without a connection to profitability, is a new word for monkey business. Make it your business to do it right!
5 Steps to Refocus During Tough Times
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Whether it’s the economy, your family, business, community or society, probably some part of your world has suffered over the last five years. Unfortunately, there are enough signs show that the next few years will continue to challenge even the luckiest, blessed and oblivious among us. Even as we strive do “right and good,” what do we do if: demand for what we sell, access to resources we require, or our energy and drive simply dwindles?
If you need a pep talk, read on.
- Recognize bad signs fast. As it’s been said, once is a coincidence, twice a trend, three times, a certainty. If something isn’t working, figure out why ASAP. The world is changing faster yet most people can’t change at all. Every day I speak to people who feel trapped in so many ways. They have become what they tolerate because their pain of changing remains greater than their pain of not changing. In business, however, your marketplace (customers, employees and vendors and investors) will tell you the truth. For the other parts, get the personal, professional or spiritual support you need to accelerate changing your bad to good.
- Take stock in your value; Your Best and Highest Use® Accept quickly that your expertise and your firm’s experience are your greatest treasure. They remain yours forever and always the ingredients and foundation of your renewal.
- Keep your eyes open; seek opportunity. Wherever there is pain, need or hope, you can find and make opportunity. Follow your heart and your head. Your internal voices are ever more righteous as you mature. When most people take a hit, they lose faith in their judgment, impact and options. Stand apart and stay confident.
- Refocus, regroup, repurpose. Take your BHU and the opportunity or pain you uncovered and link these and then find customers who will value your repackaging. Activity matters so keep trying new versions and push forward. Try giving away your reinvention or better yet sell it right away. In facing setbacks such as bad timing, backward thinking and an ADHD society, rely on your passion and conviction to drive you to success. Remember your BHU is portable and deliverable. If you doubt where’s the demand for your value, go where you:
- Are getting human and viral response
- Have raving fans
- Are scarce
- Stay focused/don’t blink. Anything you create takes 3-6 months to generate reaction/awareness in the marketplace and 1-3 years to take root. Create the opportunities for quick wins and the metrics to prove your wins are real. Before you can generate market success and profitable growth, remember to create prospects, and qualify and develop them into buyers.
- Connect online as much as you can
- Get seen, heard and interviewed
- Identify and nurture allies, referral sources and champions
- Make your viral marketing portable; avoid investing in fixed costs, particularly of traditional sales and marketing.
Whether or not this all makes sense to you, think about the parts that do and put them to good use in refocusing your business in tough times. Email me at abirol@andybirol.com.
Companies Either Grow or They Are Sold
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
While financial gamers, schemes and scams have enabled many companies to avoid either profitable growth or a sale for years…
… ultimately one of these options is inevitable.
◦A company that is profitably growing is controlled by passionately committed owners and investors.
Their firm is financially and operationally self-sufficient. There is no need to merge or look for investors. Its leaders can reduce its credit line and pay down outstanding loans. The company has customers who are happy to pay for its valuable products or services. Over time, the company will build up retained earnings and become a creator of wealth. As long as its owners are confident and passionate they should never think of giving up their independence in running it or cashing out. Life is good!
◦A company that is not growing profitably has flat or declining sales.
Its costs and expenses are fixed or rising and it starts to lose money. The company begins to consume more cash than it generates. Owner, banks or investors have to subsidize the company through credit or by tapping any retained earnings. These leaders lose passion for their business as it is no longer self-sufficient. Clearly, its customers cannot or will not pay enough for the firm to delivery its products and services. First, the company runs out of cash, then out of credit and finally must be sold.
There are only two buyers for a company that is not profitably growing:
1.New owners and investors with ideas, cash and passion to return the company to profitable growth.
2.Bankruptcy trustees who sell the company for whatever they can to pay creditors pennies on the dollar.
So companies either profitably grow or they are sold.
What’s it going to be for your company? Do you agree or disagree?
