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As a business owner, you know what it’s like to lie awake at 2 a.m. Maybe it has happened when you are excited and full of new ideas for your business. More often, it’s because you are worried about issues you will face the next day. Sometimes, it’s because you just woke up with the solution to a problem. I’ve experienced all those emotions about my businesses over the years. Awake at 2 o’clock? is where I share them with you, and hopefully help with answers that will let you sleep.
John F. Dini, CExP, CEPA
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Small business owners are the Hunters of the 21st century. We are 3% of the US population, and yet we create over half of all American jobs. As Hunters, we may not be inclined to manage by the numbers or stick to systems. Are you a Hunter or a Farmer?
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How prepared are you to exit your company?
The Assessment breaks down the four major categories of exit readiness; Finance, Planning, Operations and Revenue/Profit.
Tag Archives: entrepreneurship
Measurement Isn’t Necessarily Management
“You manage what you measure” is axiomatic in business ownership. “Employees respect what you inspect.” Understanding performance and productivity by comparing it against past performance, industry norms or internal benchmarks is useful, but measuring something doesn’t mean that you are … Continue reading
4 Responses to Measurement Isn’t Necessarily Management
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The Tyranny of The Bad Customer
“The customer is always right,” or at least that’s what most business owners profess to their employees. We post it for all to see. “Customer satisfaction is job one.” “Our boss is the customer.” The most important person in our … Continue reading
One Response to The Tyranny of The Bad Customer
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This is a great article and absolutely accurate! I represent a number of small to medium business owners and have owned businesses for many years and I find the credibility associated with online ratings to be quite shocking. As the owner of a law firm I continually stress about having a client get angry about a result in court one day and write a nasty online review the next, especially on a site that doesn’t allow users to delete reviews.
I have one client in particular that has had to reinvent and re-brand his business a few times because of online reviews and another client that was the victim of a consumer complaint site and is spending thousands of dollars trying to resolve the claims, most of which are wholly unfounded. Yet another client had the ex-husband of a girl he went on a few dates with post that he was a pedophile and claim that his business utilized fraudulent practices and was being investigated. Sadly, those posts will probably never come down because no one wants to spend thousands of dollars suing someone who will fight a silly fight and declare bankruptcy at the end of it all. Unfortunately for one of my client’s ex-employees, he is willing to spend any amount of money to get her to remove comments she made online after he fired her.
I would be surprised if employees or employers have analyzed the potential liability associated with posts and responses, or really any content they put online about another person. It is my opinion that most businesses should have new-employee trainings about this topic so as to avoid future problems.
Business owners certainly do not often consider the impact online reviews can have on the sale of their businesses. Buyers can decrease the purchase price substantially if they have to fight bad reviews because getting enough good reviews to offset one bad review is time consuming and costly. Whether or not the review actually impacts the business is irrelevant in negotiations because a seller can’t really prove otherwise.
Something new that is happening in the law is the use of reps and warranties associated with goodwill and how future reviews impact present covenants. We will be seeing a lot of litigation in the future over poorly written or understood reps and warranties in purchase agreements.
Great article John!
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Bah, Humbug! Remembering Fezziwig.
Last week was the 170th anniversary of the publication of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (December 17, 1843). The immortal words of Ebenezer Scrooge are ingrained in the memory of the entire English speaking world. I’d venture to guess that “Bah, Humbug!” … Continue reading
2 Responses to Bah, Humbug! Remembering Fezziwig.
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“God bless us everyone!”
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Nice read! A Christmas Carol is indeed one of the best stories of all time. Happy holidays!
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“We’ll Just Agree to Disagree”
A CEO was having a discussion with one of his top executives a few weeks ago. He felt strongly that the executive needed to take a certain course of action as soon as possible. The Vice President explained that the … Continue reading
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What is Mentoring?
In a recent meeting of one of our groups in The Alternative Board®, the business owners discussed mentoring. One member, a partner in a large professional firm, has been tasked with mentoring a partner in training. He asked what the … Continue reading
4 Responses to What is Mentoring?
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I would argue that coaching and teaching are part of mentoring when there is a strategic goal of developing an employee. We have a small software company. Since not long after PEI was founded in 1996, we have had a Service Item set up in QuickBooks called “Mentoring”. It is used in many contexts.
When an employee is assigned a project that requires new skills and I assist, my time is marked as Mentoring / Non-billable and their time is booked to the client project (billable or not). When I have to coach or teach a new skill that is booked to Mentoring. If I review internal work that an employee did (company website or whatever) and then discuss different techniques or strategy than they applied, that is Mentoring. However, the review process or asking them to fix something goes to Administration or Marketing or whatever normal business process is involved.
It may be correct that if an employee is simply shown who to complete a specific task so that they can perform that duty, you might call that “merely” teaching. When efforts are part of a long-term strategic goal to develop an employee into something more than a cog in the machine, then the deliberate work to accomplish the goal is legitimately mentoring.
David Basri
Point Enterprises, Inc.
http://www.pointent.com-
David, the idea to capture a mentoring role as a ‘job cost’ data point is an interesting one. We capture management consulting with our clients, which falls under mentoring with the teaching and coaching dynamic as discussed. With my own company staff I have not captured that in any way. Thanks for the eye opener!
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I have experienced all the three levels of “learning” with a person: I am mentored in a public speaking club. I have a direct and personal relationship with my mentor. She was my choice from the start. I felt that we clicked and I feel comfortable with her. She teaches me things in a focused and condensed way: all about public speaking and how to convey my message to an audience. My lessons are small assignments in the form of a speech formed in such a way for me to learn important elements of a successful speech but one at a time.
However, I think a trainer is teaching you something much more specific rather than a mentor which connects elements from different lessons and goes a second level. The sessions can be more relaxed and a bit generalized though having one special assignment due to the varied topic of the speech and the many objectives that need to be met.
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Off-topic: I have just noticed the name of the blog is awake at two o’clock. It is 2.15 AM.
I would agree that putting too much credence into deep numbers analysis is counter-productive. Mark Twain’s quote that, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies and statistics.”, comes to mind.
However, over time analytics can indicate trends in employees. One who consistently performs below other employees in whatever KPIs are being measured, needs remedial action. Trends can indicate employees who have a propensity for too much, or too little, risk. And so on. . . .
While it is no substitute for management, experience or intuition, there is a role for analytics.
David Basri
http://www.pointent.com
You assertion that “you manage what you measure” maybe accurate in the extreme of over measuring and producing an avalanche of data that hide the reality of a situation but “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” seems to be a bigger problem with small businesses.
Yes. The quantitative stuff that’s easy to measure is often not the important qualitative stuff to measure.
When you measure something in your business…you’ll probably get the behavior you expect, and then some…
• Is the measurement of “sales time with customer” getting higher sales? Lower sales? Or, more sales of easier-to-sell stuff?
• Is the measurement of “customer service time,” driving faster service, or more errors and irritated customers?
• Is the measurement of ancillary sales creating an erosion of the core brand?
• Is the measurement of errors, increasing the inspection costs of a process?
• Is the measurement of an already low “bad debt” cost driving policies hurting customer relations?
Measurement of stuff in your business can be good. Just be careful about what you measure, and how it’s implemented. Be sure to ask…
• What’s the goal?
• How much will it cost to measure it?
• How will it help the customer and the sale?
• And, what will be the unintended consequences?
Excellent response, Joel. Measuring the impact of measuring is a sensible first step. Too often we put in “controls” without sufficient thought to whether we will be controlling the right thing.