Listening, Understanding and Collaborating

This talk was delivered at the Early Words Toastmasters club at the Monticello Hotel, Longview, Washington, USA on Tuesday, March 24, 2009. Listen to the live talk at http://becausebusiness.com/files/articles1.html

Many people have lost jobs, savings and their homes. Everyone is being affected in some way. It appears that we are in the midst of transformation: financial, ecological and cultural. What could we as Early Words Toastmasters (and people everywhere) do to make a difference in our communities?
A fundamental purpose of our club is the development of our speaking and leadership skills. We can each help in our own ways, here in Toastmasters and in the other groups to which we belong. We can stimulate discussion and dialogue. What is possible and what can we envision creating? Via the Internet and through our professions we have access to broader communities whom we can inspire. We can make a difference!

The Need Is Urgent

Businesses, jobs, investments and financial security seem to be at risk. Our relationships with neighbors, family, friends and our personal sense of well-being, at times, feel threatened. There are things we can do. Fear and uncertainty must be faced. Complacency must be put aside. We in this room are leaders.
Practical collaborative action can lead to innovative new possibilities. We can practice these methods explicitly in our groups and when facing dilemmas arising at work and at home.
First practice listening to the concerns, fears and ideas of others. Repeat aloud what has been said so they know and feel they have been heard and understood. Ask for solutions and next steps. How else might the situation be understood? Research how and what others have done. Get outside opinions. Consider with the group the strengths and weaknesses of each alternative and generate new possibilities. Seek to establish a common objective that could engage the group or a larger team solving the issue collectively.
Are you an active participating member of this group or assisting it from outside? To whom might you refer the group for additional resources? Support members in identifying, negotiating and agreeing upon next steps. Members committing to accomplish a narrowly-defined, realistic project together is a major step toward the solution.

Align Finance to Action

Next, the group can begin measurable goal setting. Align appropriate financial management with the next steps to reach milestones en route to the goals. Celebrate together as you progress, comparing weekly and longer term results to earlier plans and adapting as necessary. Practicing these methods in small groups strengthens everyone’s appreciation of what’s working.
Focusing upon the common good inspires cooperation and moves action forward. Sidestep identified differences for later resolution. Break big project ideas that might be controversial into smaller manageable tasks. Agree to have differences while keeping a sense of humor and being generous with respect, praise and acknowledgement. Can you operate from “abundance” rather than “victim” thinking? Trade favors and be loose with keeping score.

Work With “The Enemy” Because There Is No “Enemy”

Former competitors are current industry colleagues when facing common crisis. In this case, clearly identify asset and skill differences. Find work for each other. Collaborate, cooperate and build each other up. Practice complimenting the contributions of others. Accept praise graciously.

This Is a Call for Action

Listening, understanding and collaboration are essential to building communities. Our Early Words Toastmasters can make a bigger difference in Longview and Southwest Washington.
How could our club’s collaboration help others? Whom might we support? What is a “common good” to which we are committed?
How is our Thursday evening Toastmasters group faring? Are there high school or college students we might invite to attend? How about business owners, employees and retired friends from Castle Rock, Rainier and Cathlamet? Let’s invite them to our meetings or to the Thursday evening gatherings.
Our Toastmasters District has committed to do a membership outreach in Cathlamet at the Wahkiakum Business Fair on April 18th at Norse Hall on Puget Island. Our Longview clubs will benefit. We can encourage participants of the Business Fair to consider joining Early Words, possibly starting their own chapter.
Strengthening our Early Words Toastmasters and other surrounding clubs will build our personal speaking and leadership skills and assist other groups and our larger communities. Can you, will you commit to attend to answer questions and meet new friends? Will you commit to use your skills for the common good?

By John E. Anderson
John@BeCauseBusiness.com

Simple Business Plan Outline

(Your Business Name) Plan
Business Owners’ Names

This Simple Business Plan Outline is an outgrowth of an earlier article posted Wednesday, January 7 at 9:43 a.m. - "Write Your Business Plan."
How to begin:
Define your objectives for this year.
Personal Objectives-

Business Objectives -

Why these objectives are realistic?
Personal Objectives -

Business Objectives -


How will you reach your objectives?
Personal Objectives -

Business Objectives -

From your answers to these questions you can produce a basic plan. Begin your plan work with a few thoughts or sentences for each of the categories below. Complete all the categories so it can be saved on your computer and printed on a single sheet of paper.

A Business Plan Outline
1. Executive Summary – brief description of your business, what you do and how you do it.
2. Customers – who are they, their needs and how you fill those needs.
3. Competition – know everything about them, strengths, weaknesses, pricing and costs.
4. Suppliers – strengths and weaknesses.
5. Marketing – sales channel, how you reach customers, what is your value proposition message, how you communicate to them and do you have the funds to do that.
6. Staff – Key staff strengths and weaknesses, what functions do you outsource?
7. Processes – methods, policies and procedures, employee job descriptions and duties.
8. Financial – forecast for 3 to 5 years. Profit and loss and balance sheets.

Actions to take to achieve personal objectives:

Milestones to reaching these objectives:

Vital Survival Strategy

Change: A Vital
Survival Strategy

Customers Are Our Business Lifeline

By John E. Anderson, MS - Management

During times of great change, business-life is like being in rough seas wearing a life preserver. If we are thrown a lifeline, we must focus and catch it.

Knowing what to focus upon and how to adapt to change can mean life or death to our business. Our customer and their sales purchases are like a lifeline for our business. In our talk today, we will discuss that lifeline. What do you offer customers and how do they use it?

How have recent market changes affected your customers and their purchases from you? The lifeline metaphor works both ways. Sometimes it’s like you’re in the water being saved by customers and sometimes you’re throwing the lifeline with your goods and services and saving your customers.

Sales from customers drive business. Without sales, everything else can be perfect and you still have accomplished nothing. Recent economic events have affected all of our sales and the sales of virtually everyone. These are blows we are taking. Like physical hits, these economic developments have certain characteristics. They are abrupt and dramatic. We’re in the midst of a series of these business “events.” We must keep our wits and shake off the blows to recover our bearings and regain our composure. We must continue thinking, analyzing and creating. Our customers still have needs and it’s our job to fill those needs.

• We must know our personal and our business situation
Where are you in your personal life and career?
Does your business have a strong foundation?
Are you completely committed to your customers’ survival?

• We must know our customers’ and their changing needs
Identify your typical clients’ apparent, shifting and deeper needs
Communicate your commitment to fulfilling customers’ needs now & tomorrow
Collaborate with customers to solidify these crucial relationships

• We must know what we sell and how our customers benefit from it
Remember the less obvious needs of customers
What is a way you can add noticeable value
Innovate in ways your competitors haven’t or can’t

• We must engage our employees’ wisdom to solve the customer satisfaction puzzle
Staff delivering products and services must be 100% certain of satisfaction
Making work easier can improve employee attitude, delivery time and margins
Train staff to meet customer needs in relentless pursuit of customer satisfaction

• Evaluate key performance indicators as you experiment with building repeat business
Create customer lock-in
Determine acquisition costs
Generate referrals – ask customers for referrals, then deliver; make them proud

Today, we have reflected upon the changes that affect your business and personal future. It’s important to gauge the length of time you personally, intend to remain in business. From this you can better understand the commitment level you’re prepared to continue making, so you can remain in business successfully.

We talked about refining your product and service delivery to satisfy customers. It is a success fundamental. Focusing upon basic business values, like customer satisfaction, is always “good business”. During challenging economic change, it’s a vital survival strategy.

Our daily work has become seeking to learn about how our customers’ needs are changing. To avoid playing catch-up, we must gain industry insight so we can predict how customers’ “deeper needs” will be in the future. How might you better educate staff to adapt our products and services to fulfilling customers’ hidden and shifting needs?

With these conceptual tools you can design and manage your sales and margins for improved sustainability with reduced risk.

Improve Employee Productivity

By John E. Anderson

Effective leadership is having a clear goal that inspires your group to quickly achieve it. How can you support your group taking action in their departments and thereby reach the company-wide goal?

Milestones Guide Progress
Establishing agreed upon milestones for the group can reduce confusion and disagreement about the sequence of action steps. Strike a balance between control and direction to avoid confusion. Invite the group to create a map to reach the goal.
Too much control and you stifle their leadership training and the value of new ideas that may hold greater possibilities than you currently see. Too little direction and the group’s diversity may result in discord and lost time. Your leadership here is crucial, and we’ll talk more about that in subsequent articles.

Develop Leadership Skills
One way you might move forward is to teach your group the leadership skills necessary to plan and budget their departments. It benefits you in two ways: you can observe and guide how they do it now and you make the group more self-managing in the future. The pleasure they get contributing to charting the direction of the organization inspires them to improve. If done consistently over time, they will require less of your time to be more successful operating the venture.
One goal of leadership is to decrease your importance in daily operations. This frees you to work more on company direction and the future. The value of your company is inversely proportional to your daily involvement in operations. Become least important to achieve greatest rewards.

Simple Written Plans
Encourage your group to read “Write Your Business Plan” and apply it to their department activity drafting their “Simple Plan Outline” for your review and comments. Ask department supervisors to rough out their ideas for the year and first, second and subsequent quarters.
Sales targets and marketing plans can be tied to purchasing seasonal stock with ideas for clearance of slow stock. Department purchasing budgets can be tied to these simple department plans. Once every three months the sales and actions accomplished can be compared to the plan and budget to evaluate and apply what’s been learned to the next quarters. In this way, annual department targets can be better accomplished by routine achievement of milestones. Plans must be flexible to adjust as new opportunities or difficulties arise. You may be planning an employee meeting. This article could contribute to that meeting. Let me know and we can discuss and modify instructions and outlines for your different departments.

john@BeCauseBusiness.com
800.249.1622

Write Your Business Plan

By John E. Anderson

Why write a business plan? There are two main reasons. A business plan helps entrepreneurs to improve operational sustainability while reducing risk. Banks and investors typically require a business plan to demonstrate the business has been carefully designed and possible difficulties have been identified and solutions considered.

How to begin:
Define your objectives.
Are these objectives realistic?
How will you reach your objectives?
From your answers to these questions you can produce a basic plan.

A Plan Outline
1. Executive Summary – brief description of your business, what you do and how you do it.
2. Customers – who are they, their needs and how you fill those needs.
3. Competition – know everything about them, strengths, weaknesses, pricing and costs.
4. Suppliers – strengths and weaknesses.
5. Marketing – sales channel, how you reach customers, what is your value proposition message, how you communicate to them and do you have the funds to do that.
6. Staff – Key staff strengths and weaknesses, what functions do you outsource?
7. Processes – methods, policies and procedures, employee job descriptions and duties.
8. Financial – forecast for 3 to 5 years. Profit and loss and balance sheets.

Completing this plan will clarify your objectives. It will be a dynamic plan, changing every day.
Keep your plan up to date with a quarterly, annual and multi-year perspective. Refine and develop the plan each 90 days to reflect changes.
As you develop your plan, consider your personal objectives. What personal lifestyle, investment and retirement goals do you have that you would like your business to help you achieve? Your business is your profit engine to create greater personal wealth and security.

Create Cash Reserves
Building a secure, personal investment portfolio and cash reserve will enable you to make loans to your business as it goes through varying economic circumstances. Being a successful business owner requires strategic, long-term planning with preparation for booms and busts in the marketplace.

Anticipate the Unexpecteded
You owe it to your family, employees and customers to anticipate and prepare for all eventualities. Training and development of key employees for succession includes your transition out of daily responsibilities at some point. This planning and employee training is a critical responsibility best done over many years to insure a successful continuation of the firm.

john@BeCauseBusiness.com
800.249.1622

Adapting to Change

This article was first presented as a talk December 16, 2008 at 6 a.m. to Early Words, a Toastmasters International group, at the Monticello Hotel, Longview, Washington. An audio of this article is available at www.BeCauseBusiness.com by selecting the title above - Adapt To Change.

Adapting to Change in Challenging Times

By John E. Anderson

Economic concerns have become frightening. The news has been bleak nationally, globally and locally for credit, investments and rising unemployment. Today's news is wildly conflicting. Manufacturing in the U.S. is at it's lowest level since 1948, on the one hand. And GM and Chrysler received their initial bridge loans prompting the stock market to surge 200 points, the largest rally since November. Our economy is on a roller coaster of ups and downs.

As a management consultant and business coach, I have been advising clients throughout 2008 to trim expenses, particularly payroll. In the last weeks of the year, I've been speaking to business groups urging owners NOT to cut payroll. Instead, focus upon how to improve products and services, specifically by quickly improving the training and development of staff, and thereby increase customer satisfaction.

What do your clients value most in what you offer? How might you add value? Communicate directly with your clients. Collaborate with them closely in the products and services which they need most. This is the time to insure your customers know you're there and focused on meeting their most crucial needs. Meet with your employees to engage them. If they wish to remain employed, they must focus on better serving customers deepest needs. Make your workforce more productive. Additional layoffs will weaken your firm's profit engine and only accelerate the economic decline and worsen foreclosures and the economy.

Today I'm going to talk briefly about three business concepts which I consider particularly relevant: creative destruction, appreciative inquiry and project management.

Creative Destruction

One way we may look at this current economic period is as a time of "Creative Destruction." The idea of creative destruction was introduced in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Mikail Bekunin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Werner Sombart. Sombart wrote Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism) in 1913 (p. 217), where he wrote: "again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises." Companies and products that once dominated socieites and cultures are replaced. Examples of companies include Xerox in copiers and Polaroid in cameras. Walmart has replaced Montgomery Ward, KMart and Sears by using superior marketing and management of inventory and personnel. Product examples include cassettes replaced by 8-tracks, then CDs and now mp3s.

Successful innovation leads to market power which erodes the profits of existing giants only to itself succumb to the pressure from new entrants to the field. General Electric is the third largest company in the world. It has survived by routinely reinventing itself. GE has used the principle of creative destruction with their product lines scaling back and then discontinuing products which are still profitable if new innovations are not introduced. This is done to keep their lines fresh, creative and dynamic.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry is building on what's working, not fixing what's broken. What is working best and how can you expand that in your company? Work with your employees to identify what your customers love most about what your firm does. Collaborate with them on how to deliver it faster, better and cheaper. Then, collaborate with your customers on how those products solve their problems and together figure out how to meet your clients' deeper needs faster, better and cheaper. Innovate to survive.

Project Management

Project Management is a science of getting things done with groups of people. Every organization has stalled projects and dilemmas. Learn more about project management methods to accelerate your project completion. I am one of a group of consultants offering free workshops on a variety of management methods to help groups adapt to our challenging times. We connect businesses with the exact skills and knowledge needed via networks of business resources.

Free Business Assessments

We offer free business assessments to collaborate with owners, evaluating what projects hold the greatest promise for their business sustainability and survival.

To conclude, an attitude of aptitude is essential to avoid depression when chaos is everywhere. Each of us must be leaders, take control of our direct individual situation and makle the best we can with it. We can't just give up, sit in bed and pull the covers over our heads. Yes, there are problems, so what there have always been problems. Let's look at what is working. With credit stopped, we're reducing debt. Is it hard? Of course, but it'll force us to be more creative and value what we have.

How do I provide value and to whom?

Can I meet my clients' needs more effectively? What would help my clients fulfill their needs better, faster or cheaper? Promotion of our staff, product and service will capture clients' attention. Then as the market recovers, our market share will expand and we will have grown and benefited. The time is NOW to organize priorities, establish what's needed and train staff to take responsibility to do the same with their departments. We can do this! What's next? What can we do together? Where shall we start?

john@BeCauseBusiness.com
800.249.1622