I recently attended a keynote from Claire Diaz-Ortiz. Diaz-Ortiz is an author, speaker, founder of the non-profit “Hope Runs”, ex-executive at Twitter, voted one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” and is known as “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter!”

Besides being articulate, intelligent, and successful in the business world, she has a very compelling personal story that she is able to effectively weave in with the business side of her life.

So, when she defines a system to make you and your business stand out, we should listen!

Her keynote outlined the framework for this system that she uses to help her and her organizations standout in the marketplace.

She calls the system “SHARE.”

S.H.A.R.E.

Diaz-Ortiz’s framework for how stand out is built around the acronym SHARE. I have briefly summarized the components below.

• Story – The story your business is presenting must be clear and precise on all platforms. Every social media channel, your website, your traditional marketing channels, and your staff must be telling a consistent and repeatable story. You can use things like; pictures, the engagement ladder, or other tools to get people hooked but your message must be clear, precise and consistent.
• How – Use as many platforms as possible to get your message out. Leverage social media wherever possible. Create a strategy and build a team that is responsible to deliver the strategy. The strategy must be flexible and adaptable because the marketplace changes continuously!
• Audience – Engage your audience by asking questions on social media. Involve people by starting conversations. Leverage hashtags and start movements remembering that you and your business are not the “hero” in your audience’s story. The audience is the “hero” and your business is the “guide” (StoryBrand model).
• Reach – Get out there and engage and extend your audience. Remember that going viral is not your goal. Engaging your audience by providing value is the goal.
• Excellence – Do everything with excellence. Anyone can be average or mediocre! Stand out by being better. Own your mistakes when they happen and don’t pretend they never happened. Social media is a powerful way to own your mistakes!

Take Action

Review your business this week and determine where you need to bolster your SHARE strategy. How compelling and precise is your story? Is it consistent across on all platforms? Do you have a defined strategy for marketing your story and are you engaging your audience effectively? What areas in your business are not yet operating at the excellent level?

Take action today and build a solid SHARE framework for your business!

Finally, take a look at these related posts for more information:

• How to Make Your Customer a Hero
• Building a StoryBrand
• What Are Your and Your Business Becoming
• 4 Critical Rules for Any Business

“Be absolutely clear about who you are and what you stand for. Refuse to compromise.” Brian Tracy

How does your business stand out in the marketplace? Leave your comments below!

We help leaders navigate marketplace complexities and build successful and lasting business legacies.

Call or email us today for more information or to book your free business assessment: 

587-227-5179

info@thinkingbusinessblog.com 

Be sure to download a free copy of my new Ebook: 12 Steps to Business Transformation and to sign up at www.thinkingbusinessblog.com for weekly blog updates delivered to your inbox.

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Most organizations are bleeding away profit through holes they don’t even know they have!

That’s right! If you are not periodically and systematically looking for inefficiencies, gaps, old processes, or broken systems, chances are, your business is bleeding profitability.

These holes that are bleeding profits from your organization are generally not a result of a deliberate or malicious act. They just form slowly as the marketplace shifts and as technology changes. These shifts and changes create holes that must be “fixed” in the same way a pothole in a road must be fixed!

$156,000 Timesheet

A number of years ago I ran a strategic offsite meeting for a large engineering company I was leading. I facilitated an exercise called “Kill a Stupid Rule.” This purpose of this exercise is to identify any silly rules or processes that are costing the business money.

One of the “stupid” rules that was uncovered very quickly by the team was the need for salaried staff (overhead staff not billable to the customer) to complete a timesheet every week. As an engineering company, the majority of our staff completed timesheets and these timesheets were turned into invoices and used to bill our customers. However, for staff that are not being billed on an hourly basis, there is no real need for a weekly timesheet. The only timesheet requirement is for sick time or vacation time . . . essentially a timesheet by exception.

At the time, our business systems demanded that the salaried staff complete a timesheet and that the timesheet be run through a series of approval gates before being accepted. This process took a lot of time from the people completing the timesheets and the managers needing to approve the timesheets. The estimate was that there were 30 hours being burned doing timesheets and timesheet approvals every week.

30 hours at an average cost of $100/hr is $3000 a week! This is $156,000 per year! This was money that was simply “disappearing” or bleeding from the business with no benefit! Worse yet, the process was frustrating staff and the time was being wasted rather than being spent on activities that added value!

This met the definition of a “stupid rule!”

So, what can an organization do to plug the gaps and stop bleeding money?

8 Ways to Stop Bleeding Profit!

There are probably an unlimited number of ways to stop the flow of profit from your business. However, I have selected eight relatively easy, yet powerful ways which are briefly outlined below:

1. Build Discipline and a Strategic Mindset: Create a calendar block once a quarter to systematically look at your business for areas of waste or inefficiency. Do not allow anything to interrupt the cadence of this review.
2. Remove Organization Scar Tissue: Run a process like Kill a Stupid Rule with your leadership team and with randomly selected staff. You will be amazed at the waste your staff finds that your leadership is unaware of (or worse yet, trying to cover up!)
3. Automation: Have your team list out every process in the business that contains a lot of manual steps. Evaluate if these processes are really necessary. Can you simply eliminate the process? If the process is critical, can you automate it?
4. Reclaim Resources: List out all the processes that consume a lot of resources. Are these processes necessary? Can you eliminate them? Can you optimize the process so it uses fewer resources?
5. Time and Money Ranking: Rank the processes or activities within your business by the time they are using or the money they are burning. Then rate their effectiveness in terms of the value they provide or the revenue (sales) they produce. Are there mismatches between the time or money and the return or value? What can be done to optimize these areas?
6. Internal Issue Identification: Have your team list all the issues that the business is dealing with that impact the following areas. What plans need to be put in place to deal with these issues?
   • Delivery of your core product or service
   • Your brand value
   • The community
7. Create a Wish List: Create a wish list of products, processes, tools, data, systems, structures, etc., that would take your business to the “next level” if you were to purchase and implement them. Rank these in a grid to determine the highest impact versus easiest to implement. Select one of the largest impact and easiest to implement items and put a plan in place to implement it.
8. Tell the Truth: I was working with a PR company recently and they were dealing with a very tough issue for a client that had the potential to severely damage the client’s reputation. They were advising the client to “choose a truth” and they would spin a story around this and release it to the press before the real news hit the market. This is absolutely the wrong approach! When there is a problem brewing an organization must always hit the issue head on and not “choose a truth” but tell “the truth.” Anything other than “the truth” will always cost an organization so much more when the “real” truth emerges . . . and the real truth will always emerge!

Take Action

Go ahead and book your quarterly strategic review meetings into your calendar. Pick one or two of the ideas above and dig into your business to identify and stop bleeding profit!

Finally, review these related posts for more ideas:

• 5 Simple Steps to Kill a Stupid Rule
• Why You Need to Kill Your Company
• Are Rules, Processes or Tools Killing Your Business
• How to Reduce Your Workload and Get More Done
• 10 Questions that Turn an Insurmountable Problem into an Inconsequential Event
• 11 Commandments of Business Success

“It’s the innovations aimed at the bottom line that yield the profits to fund investment on new products and services.” Matthew E. May

What experience do you have in finding and eliminating “profit leaks” that may provide value to other readers? Leave your comments below!

We help leaders navigate marketplace complexities and build successful and lasting business legacies.

Call or email us today for more information or to book your free business assessment: 

587-227-5179

info@thinkingbusinessblog.com 

Be sure to download a free copy of my new Ebook: 12 Steps to Business Transformation and to sign up at www.thinkingbusinessblog.com for weekly blog updates delivered to your inbox.

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As most years do, 2016 seemed to come and go rather quickly! It is probably safe to say that 2016 was filled with a lot more challenges than usual for many people . . . especially those who rely on the oil and gas market for their livelihood. Many people lost their jobs and many businesses were shuttered.

However, many business also thrived and grew in 2016. It’s not that these businesses were immune from the downturn but rather were nimble, efficient, and able to adjust and change their focus to find new markets for their products and services.

This is what my eBook “12 Steps to Business Transformation” is all about. It describes a business system that will help any business to decrease costs, drive growth and increase profits. You can download it for free using this link or from Amazon using this link.

In addition to higher level concepts outlined in this eBook, I have provided many more details of business transformation in my weekly blog posts. My top five blog posts for 2016 were;

1. How to Build a Powerful Business Strategy
2. How to Use Powerful Goals to Ignite Your Business
3. 4 Critical Rules for Any Business
4. 13 Qualities of Successful Business Leaders 
5. Five Ways to Avoid the Stupidity of “Group Think”

I will leave you with this question: What is it that you need to take responsibility for in 2017 to make yourself and your business even more successful?

Wishing you a happy, successful and prosperous New Year!

“Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to become successful.” Zig Ziglar

Leave a comment below on what you are going to in 2017 to make your business more successful.

Download a free copy of my new Ebook: 12 Steps to Business Transformation. If you are interested in a business assessment to help kick off your business transformation, contact me at info@thinkingbusinessblog.com or at 587-227-5179.

Be sure to sign up at www.thinkingbusinessblog.com for weekly blog updates delivered to your inbox.

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Vision is a powerful picture of the future which creates an ideal and unique image of what your organization will become or achieve. It provides the reason for the organization’s existence. It defines the organization’s reason WHY and is the “North Star” that every action in the organization is guided by.

Defining the vision for your business is also step 1 in my new free Ebook “12 Steps to Business Transformation.”

This is arguably the most important step in any business. Without it, there is no apparent reason for the business to exist and nothing for the employees or staff to rally around.

12 Steps to Business Transformation

12 Steps to Business Transformation is founded on a simple business model and describes the 12 steps required to implement and execute on the model. The whole model is summarized in the Thinking Business Blueprint shown below.

And, as mentioned above, the first step in the Blueprint is to define your Vision.

I have written about what organizational Vision is, why it is critical for your success, who is responsible for it, how you define it, how you communicate it and the importance of a Vision statement in the following articles:

• What is Your Company’s Vision and Why Should You Care
• Did Your Organization’s Vision Leak
• How Do Leaders Get Their Organizations from Vision to Action
• How to Craft a Vision Statement

Go ahead and review these to get a solid understanding of the Vision statement.

Business Results Prove Vision Statement Effectiveness

I have seen the effectiveness of a powerful Vision statement in action but I have been challenged many times by business owners to show some statistical data proving the importance of the Vision statement. So, I located a couple of great studies that I have summarized below.

1. According to an article in Forbes by Joseph Folkman, employees who don’t know their company’s Vision statement or don’t find it meaningful are only engaged at work 16% of the time (this means 84% of the employees in these companies are disengaged!) For businesses where employees do find the Vision statement meaningful, employees are 68% engaged. This is a HUGE difference! A properly defined and communicated Vision statement can result in a 52% higher employee engagement rate! Engaged employees mean that your organization will be more productive, efficient, and profitable!

2. Further to this article, Strategy and Business published “What Drives a Company’s Success” where their research showed that companies that have clarity of identity (common Vision on who they are and where they are going) have three-year total shareholder return growth rates over 3% higher than their competitors! The top five examples of businesses with the clearest identity they studied are:
   • Apple
   • BMW
   • Caterpillar
   • Coca-Cola
   • Honda

How would you like to outperform your competitors by 3% each and every year? Imagine the market share you can gain with 3% annual compounding market share growth! All with a simple tweak . . . Getting alignment around a common Vision!

In Summary

It seems the evidence is overwhelming. A properly defined and communicated Vision statement has a huge impact on your business and positions you for success in the marketplace!

Go ahead and download the 12 Steps to Business Transformation Ebook for free or in Kindle format from Amazon. Spend some time this week reading it and then complete step one by defining the Vision for your business and begin communicating this throughout your organization.

“If we don’t know who we are or where we’re going, how can we possibly know exactly what we should do today, and tomorrow?  Vision is fundamental for ethical success . . .With a powerful ethical vision directing all our other thoughts, we don’t need long lists of rules to guide us.” Tom Morris

Leave a comment below on what your organization’s Vision is or the impact it has made in your organization.

Be sure to sign up at www.thinkingbusinessblog.com for weekly blog updates delivered to your inbox and feel free to forward this article to anyone that could benefit.

Download a free copy of my new Ebook: 12 Steps to Business Transformation

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What does customer service look like in your business? Do your employees care about your customers are they just “doing their job”?

It is critical for your business survival and growth that your employees truly care for your customers rather than treat them like just another generic transaction.  A customer service mindset must be purposefully built and nurtured in your organization rather than being left to chance.

I recently traveled to Houston for some business meetings. When I arrived at the airport and got my rental car it was pouring rain. By the time I got onto the Southwest freeway at 5:30 PM it resembled a large parking lot and not a freeway! After fighting the traffic for about an hour, I pulled off the freeway at Lakewood and had dinner at the Café Express.

After dinner, I jumped into my rental and drove to the hotel (Sugar Land Marriott) without incident. When I arrived and popped the trunk to get my luggage, there was nothing there! Someone had broken into my car at the restaurant and stolen my luggage! Fortunately, I had my computer with me in Café Express so it never got stolen but everything else did.

The staff at the Sugar Land Marriott jumped into action. They did everything they could to assist me in getting ready for my meetings the next day. They offered advice on where to buy clothes and offered to bring up any toiletry items that I might need. By the time I got to my room, they had a tray of snacks and beverages waiting!

They had a customer service mindset!

So, how do you instill this customer service mindset into your culture and into your employees?

This is not a simple five minute exercise. Building a strong, customer service culture requires some deep thought, strategy and leadership to define exactly the culture you desire. Once you have this defined, the following seven principles will help you to instill the customer service culture in your organization.

1. It starts with you. The organization’s leaders must model the behavior they want to see in their employees. It does no good to “talk the talk” if you don’t “walk the walk!” Show your employees how you want the customers treated by how you interact with the customers. Model the way!
2. Make sure your organization’s definition of customer service is well defined and continuously communicated to all staff
3. Make customer service one of your top values
4. Create a rewards system for your employees so they can be recognized by their peers for exemplary customer service
5. Implement Schulze’s 4 rules
6. Constantly solicit feedback from your customers to judge where your organization is at. Make adjustments to your organization based on the feedback and always be in a continuous improvement mode
7. Talk about the customer service culture in as many employee communications as possible. Make it a standard agenda item in meetings, celebrations and awards

The Marriott employees that served me did not have to get involved in solving my crisis or do anything for me except check me in. However, they took extra steps to help get me prepared for my week and to make me as comfortable as possible. They put my needs first! Although I was already a Marriott fan, this great service has just reinforced how much I like Marriott and will go out of my way to stay at a Marriott whenever possible.

Don’t think that a customer service culture is just a management pipe dream. Purposefully define your customer service culture and then build it around these principles and your customers will become diehard fans, provide free word-of-mouth marketing and form the foundation of a “repeat business” machine!

Are your employees doing what is best for your business and the customer or are they just “doing their job”?

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” Sam Walton

Be sure to sign up at www.thinkingbusinessblog.com for weekly blog updates delivered to your inbox and feel free to forward this article to anyone that could benefit.

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