Monthly Archives: October 2013

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

Great article on growth and customer “FIT”. Your reference to going to the supermarket when you are hungry is dead on when starting a business from scratch. Anything and everything is a good opportunity and job. As we have grown, we have been fortunate enough to improve the quality of our customers, replacing some of our original customers for many for the reasons you mentioned. As we have grown, we have also made changes for one other important reason.

As our business has matured, we have a much clearer Vision, Mission and Strategic Plan and unfortunately, some of the customers that helped us start our business no longer align with our current and future plans. While many of us strive to support them for too long, when a customer no longer fits, it’s typically not a fit from either side and prolonging the inevitable isn’t in anyone’s best interest. It’s just a tough decision to let go of good customers that no longer fit your business!

I totally agree with trying to match the good customers with another provider, one that better fits their needs and whom they better align with.

I work for a small/medium sized family owned business as their CFO. When the owner went out and received his eye-widening “professionally prepared” valuation of his business I asked him the simple question; “would YOU pay that much for the right to run this place?” The follow on question is “you can pay x amount because you already know the players, products and producers. Would a buyer who does NOT have that information at hand need to discount that number to generate similar earnings ?”

Every valuation is prepared with an end use in mind: Seller’s POV, Buyer’s POV, Tax prep POV. Each end use will result in a different number. From an owner’s perspective, look at all of them and ask yourself “would I pay that?”