Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

If you own and run your own business, you may relate to the idiom, “its lonely at the top.” It doesn’t much matter if the top is being in charge of hundreds of employees, or just one. Being chief decision maker means taking all of the responsibility. That is why it is so important for small business owners to have people they can go to for advice. I wrote about this before when I suggested every small business owner should have a M.O.M. I wanted to revisit the subject because I believe it is one of the core things every business owner should focus on.

Specifically, I want to talk to you about creating an advisory board. You may think of this as an abstract idea or something for bigger businesses, but its not. Every business, no matter how small, should have one. I am currently a one person business and I am working on creating my own advisory board.

What an Advisory Board Looks Like

The main thing to understand is that this board can be made up of anyone, anywhere. You don’t need to pay the people who you go to for advice, at least not until you grow so big that you need a formal board of directors. Furthermore, an advisory board can be a give and take situation. Everyone on the board can be small business owners and can share ideas with one another. That is how Becky McCray created her board.

This might work for you, or you might want a more mixed board that you feel more accountable to. In an upcoming episode of my podcast I talk to Melinda Emerson, who suggests that your advisory board include at least one former executive, one small business owner or entrepreneur, one person from another industry, and one customer.

Setting up and Running an Advisory Board

Putting a board together is often as simple as asking. You need to take the initiative and schedule monthly meetings. You might meet with them all at once or one by one. Your board might be local so you can have face to face meetings, or all over the world. What matters is that you have people that you respect that you can go to for advice.

The second thing you need to do, once you have a board in place, is to actually listen to these people and act on their advice. An advisory board is only as good as the action you take.

Geoffrey P. Lamdin, of Left Field Solutions, LLC., had this advice to share in the All Business Answers Success in 2010 Free Report.

“Create, re-invigorate, or expand your Advisory Board. Then listen to them and ACT upon what they are telling you! Seek out the BEST of the BEST for your advisors, regardless of where in the world they are – the internet and Skype are at your disposal. Small businesses often suffer from isolation, “small business think” paradigm, and perceived limitations. These are a sure path to eventual (or sooner) failure. Reach out to successful advisors for continuous, energized mentoring – and go!”

Can You Use Advice?

Take a moment and think about what a little good advice can do for you. Think about what it means if that advice can come from a perspective outside of your business, or even from your customer base.

We all need advice. We can all benefit from a different point of view, and from someone else’s expertise. If you do not have people that you go to on a regular basis for advice, why not? I’d be willing to wager that it’s not because you are pompous S.O.B. who thinks you know it all. Instead, you probably just don’t know how, or who, to ask.

It is okay to ask for advice. It doesn’t make you stupid. In fact, it is one of the secrets to great business success.

This post is part of a series on Success.

See more posts from this series.

Get a Free Report on Success for Small Business.

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Hello, I’m Bradford Shimp. I’ll admit that I am usually more comfortable giving advice than in asking for it. But I really believe that getting good advice is key to building a successful business, and I’m working on it. If you need advice on how to optimize your website for search traffic and lead generation, check out my business at BroadRiverCreative.com.

This post is part of a series on Success.

See more posts from this series. Get a Free Report on Success for Small Business.

If you want your business to become ever more successful and you want a team around you that is loyal and trustworthy, one of the best investments you can make is to further educate for your employees.

This could include helping with college bills, but it also encompasses a wide range of education opportunities including attending conferences, listening in on webinars, reading books and blogs, and more.

To educate employees is like reinvesting in a stock that offers you a great dividend and a long term upside. Yes, there is a chance that the stock will go south, and there is a chance an employee that you invest education dollars in will move on. But the potential reward is a loyal workforce that is committed to improving themselves and your business.

Here’s the thing. The business world is changing. These changes will have a bigger and bigger impact on your business. You can keep yourself and your employees up to date, or you can just hope that you will still be able to compete.

Kathi Elster, co-author of Working for You Isn’t Working for Me, offers this advice:

“Invest in educating your people – webinars, classes, books, guest speakers – this is the time to learn what is NEW and how that will impact your industry and your company.”

If you have employees, the great news is that you do not have to stay on top of changes all by yourself. By offering up education, you can recruit your workforce to help your business grow and continue to succeed, even in an ever-changing environment. Not investing in education will leave you far behind. If your sales rep still uses a Rolodex, it is time to upgrade. And it is far better and cheaper to upgrade through education than through firing and hiring.

Not only will a better educated workforce be able to do a better job, your business will also benefit from more engaged employees and a greater level of employee loyalty. Here is what Alan Vengel, author of 20 Minutes to a Top Performer, has to say about engaging employees to build loyalty.

“Take care of your people. These are the employees who have survived with you and helped your business stay afloat in the last 18 months. Most business owners and managers have been so focused on keeping the business going, and keeping revenue flowing, that they have forgotten to take the basic steps necessary to keep loyal employees motivated and engaged. Right now would be a great time for leaders and small business owners to begin to reengage their workforce with conversations about professional needs to improve engagement in the work and future personal development. The same people who helped sustain your business will be the people who grow your business as the economy improves. Businesses that focus on their people will be best for prepared for success in the future.”

The personal development of your employees is more important than you might think. You should seek to create a company full of specialists whose skills complement one another. By creating a culture of improvement, you will increase engagement and loyalty in current workers and be able to attract the best new hires.

Do you do anything now to encourage or help employees get further education? Training and personal development is a big key to success. You can start rather cheaply, even connecting employees with some free web resources. Pass on books that will be helpful to employees as they do their jobs. Of course, a commitment to company wide improvement means that you also need to be committed to your own self improvement and education.

What are you going to do about this?

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Hello, I’m Bradford Shimp. I am an education-junkie, and can’t begin to tell you how much my thirst for learning has helped me. You can connect with me on Facebook or Twitter.

photo credit: debaird™

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It always amazes me that, come election time, an incumbent politician can pretty much drop everything and run for re-election. It doesn’t matter if they are a senator, a govenor, or even the President of The United States of America.

What is even more interesting is that when they do drop everything to run, government doesn’t miss a beat. Everything goes on as normal.

Of course, this is possible because each politician is surrounded by teams of people who help get the job done. In fact, a politician’s job consists of shaking hands, casting vision, and making decisions.

As a small business owner, there is a lot that you can learn from a politician.

Get a Team Around You

First, form a great team. This team should be able to keep things humming without your involvement in every detail. Politicians are famous for avoiding the details. They don’t write their own speeches, they don’t do their own research. They rely on the quality of their team.

Cast the Vision

The next lesson is that it is your job to guide, not to do. Cast a vision for your business. Politicians have platforms. They bring in key people to help them develop and push their agenda. You need to set up the goals for your business and then find people who are passionate about achieving them.

Make Decisions

The third lesson is to make decisions. Politicians make a lot of decisions, some very publicly by casting a vote. As a business owner, most of your decisions are public as well. They effect employees and customers. If you are wishy-washy with your decision making, it is going to have a negative effect in your business. Look at politicians who make two contrary votes. They are ridiculed as wafflers.

In order to make good decisions that all work together to push your business in a certain direction, you simply need solid goals and a destination in mind for your business. For politicians, this is called ideology. Your business should have it’s own ideology.

Build Support

Finally, you need to know how to build support. Politicians are superstars of networking and building public support. For all the fancy new communication tools, politicians still shake a lot of hands.

For the business owner, it is important to communicate to employees, customers, and the public. Too many business owners are holed up in their offices. Get out there and interact. It will motivate employees. It will help you figure out how to better serve the customer. It will impress the public and pave the path for new customers.

We all can find some negative things to say about politicians, especially the ones we don’t agree with. But as small business owners, it turns out there is a lot you can learn from them.

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Hello, I’m Bradford Shimp. I’ve run for office (and failed miserably at it). What I love is small business. That is why I write this blog, and it is why I am building my business to help other small businesses. Follow me on Twitter.

No business owner likes to hear a complaint about her business. This is her baby, after all. But, for better or worse, complaints happen. Things go wrong. People screw up.

When you get a complaint, what you do with it is important. A customer complaint is an opportunity to learn and make your business better, and to develop loyalty with customers. Or, if you like, its an opportunity to be selfish, to blame others, and to hide under a rock.

Too often complaints are viewed as anomalies and ignored. This shouldn’t be the case. Every complaint should be deconstructed and analysed, not to see if there is a flaw in the complaint, but to see if there is a flaw in your business. Even complaints from bad customers are important. They can highlight cracks in your organization. They may just highlight the fact that you are not doing a good enough job finding the right customer. But that is a real problem that needs a real solution.

You need to have a process for dealing with complaints. It could look something like this:

1. Receive the complaint with humility. You’re not perfect, so no need to pretend that you are.
2. Personally apologize to the customer. As an active small business owner, you should deal with complaints personally. Larger businesses should have as high up a person as possible dealing with complaints.
3. Make it better. Talk to the customer and see how you can make it better. Let the customer lead you here. Each person will be a little different. For instance, some will want their money back, while others will want a replacement. Find out the customer’s specific need and take responsibility for filling it.
4. Analyse the issue. Problems don’t happen in a vacuum. It doesn’t matter if you never received that particular complaint before, it is still a valid complaint for that person. Think through what happened and figure out what went wrong. Don’t overreact, but don’t under-react either. Here’s an example. Maybe the customer’s complaint was that your price was too high for the quality of the product. If you have never heard this complaint before, don’t rush out and change the price of the product. Instead, you may need to look at how that customer got sold, what he was promised, etc. Maybe the problem isn’t in your price, but in your selling promises.
5. Fix the problem. You need to be proactive in fixing complaint causing issues. Yes, make the customer feel better. But that alone doesn’t cause the problem not to happen again. Establish a culture in your company where mistakes are not accepted, but where everyone takes responsibility for them and works together to make sure they don’t happen again. Don’t be afraid to dig in to the root causes of the complaint. It will probably turn out that the problem lies in something different than the surface issue. If you don’t dig, you may just dismiss the complaint as something out of your control. But nothing is out of your control in the business. Dig, and you may find issues in training, in vendor selection, in quality control, in attitudes and culture, or in any number of areas. In fact, the complaint may be a godsend because it will help you discover a hairline crack that will cause you nothing but trouble when you put the weight of growth on it.

A complaint can be a wonderful thing, if it is leveraged properly. Too often, you never hear the grumblings of a customer. It takes a special kind of person to confront you with your mistake. Don’t dismiss this person as a trouble maker. For every loud complainer, there are a number of quite grumblers. So embrace the complaint and fix it on the level of the customer and also within your business, no matter how deep you have to dig. Your business will benefit.

Hint: Use Toyota’s Five Whys. Keep asking why did this happen until you reach the root of the problem. When you think you have found the answer, be sure to ask one more why. For instance, you may think you have found that an employee is the problem. But why did the employee make the mistake? Was there inadequate training? Or if the employee is truly a bad apple, then why is she working for you. If you don’t dig deep enough, the problems will just reoccur. And please remember, as a business owner, every problem will eventually be traced back to you. Be humble and willing to grow.

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Bradford Shimp helps small businesses navigate the web and bring in more leads at BroadRiverCreative.com

Good decision making is key to running a business. There are two main aspects to being a good decision maker. One is that you make good decisions. The other is that you aren’t afraid to go ahead and make a decision in the first place. But how do you tell if you are a good decision maker or a bad one?

There are two measurements that I want to talk about. First, there is the questions of whether your decisions stick. Second, there is the question of whether you consistently have to figure things out in the moment.

Do Your Decisions Stick?

You can measure whether or not you make good decisions by figuring out if the decisions you make stand the test of time. Sure, not all decisions, even good ones, will be relevant in the future. And you should be flexible enough to change your mind. However, if you find that you have a pattern of going back on decisions, you have a problem.

If your decisions are constantly changing, it is because you have not been putting in the time and thought you need to make the right decision. If you are a pizza shop and you decide to place an automatic gratuity on the bill for house deliveries, but then change your mind because of customer complaints, it turns out you made a bad decision. Again, this type of thing would have to happen over and over again for you to determine that you are a bad decision maker.

The way to cure bad decisions is to do the work up front. Learn how to research the possible effects of a decision. If you are going to make a decision that effects customers, consider asking a panel of customers about it first. If you want to buy a piece of equipment for your business, work out a plan that looks at cost and return on investment. To make good decisions, you need to be realistic. To make bad decisions, you just need to fly be the seat of your pants.

One other reason you may find yourself having to constantly amend your decisions is because you are making them for the wrong reasons. Your decisions should be based on your goals and vision. If you are making decisions out of pressures from customers or employees or vendors, you are not making them for the right reason. Run every single decision past your company vision and goals.

Are You Always Figuring Things Out in the Moment?

The other side of the coin is the person who never really makes decisions. If this is you, you probably find yourself always “putting out fires” and figuring things out at the moment of need. You may make decisions, but you don’t usually write them down and incorporate them into procedure. Your business is run by you, and your people look to you for all things, from mundane to monumental.

Unless you need to feel important, you are in big trouble. When you put off making decisions and instead just providing answers when they are needed, you are also putting off building a business. If all of the big stuff and most of the small stuff needs to go through you, what happens when you are not here?

It is pretty frustrating to employees when there is not a clear procedure they can follow to solve problems. Sure, some things will come up that you could never plan for. But most things can be figured out ahead of time and dealt with by competent employees. By maintaining control and not giving them the tools to make the call, you are telling your employees that they are less than competent.

The problem is that you just don’t make decisions. If you do, you don’t make them long term by writing them down and turning them into company policy and procedure. You may be the ace in the hole when dealing with issues on the fly, but your company can not be sustained on that. Instead of putting decisions off to the last minute, you need to empower your employees by thinking ahead a little.

Thinking ahead is the key to good decision making. With that skill, and by knowing who to ask for advice on a decision, you can go from bad decision maker to good. You owe it to yourself and the future of your business to work hard to make good decisions.

If you are generally a good decision maker, but have made a really bad decision, thats okay. Yes, you can loose money or a good customer or even worse, a good employee, from a bad decision. But you are going to make some. The key is to make sure your good decisions far outweigh your bad by committing to think about your decision ahead of time so you can stick with it and so it can become easy to follow procedure for your employees.

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com