Category Archives: Team

How Do You Institutionalize Double-Digit Growth? Six Suggestions

Situation: A company is enjoying 10% organic growth per year and wants to sustain this growth rate. They enjoy a favorable position as a technology leader. Their principal strategy is to continually advance the technology. The chief obstacle to ongoing technological superiority is getting the right people to populate their brain trust. How do you institutionalize double-digit growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Look for domestic office locations that have the right talent but a lower cost of living. Florida presents attractive cost of living with low employee turnover.
  • Can the company compartmentalize?
    • Set up a remote location, run by a trusted individual, and do portions of the work there.
  • Be aware that teamwork within the company becomes a challenge with remote locations.
    • A communications strategy – for example videoconferencing – can help to engender teamwork across distance.
    • The pandemic made videoconferencing a far more viable alternative than it was prior to the pandemic.
  • If the company’s infrastructure is highly bureaucratic or the cost of quality high, can adjustments be made that will relieve some of the cost pressures?
    • Creating “Hot Teams” is a method to developing new, innovative solutions.
    • Can the company’s technology be leveraged to improve productivity – for example, using modeling and simulation to reduce prototyping costs?
  • Can the company employ knowledge management?
    • Gather lessons learned from past and recently completed projects.
    • Share good or best practices.
    • Make sure that new efforts do not start from scratch.
  • Consider outsourcing to universities, with proper contracts.

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How Do You Guide a Company Through a Sale? Five Thoughts

Situation: A company was built on capital equipment complemented by annuity sales of supplies used by the equipment. The company is moving toward automation of technology and offshore production of OEM equipment. An OEM partner will take on the equipment side of the business and the company will focus on automated supply solutions with sales direct to the end customer. The OEM partner has approached the company with a purchase offer. How do you guide a company through a sale?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • It is important to determine the value proposition, both from the company’s standpoint and the standpoint of the OEM buyer. The company’s objective will be to optimize the intersection of these two views of the value proposition — to its benefit.
  • Look at current employees and the technology and determine what to do to preserve their positions and interests. This will become part of the negotiation, but it is essential to have a clear idea of how this meshes with the CEO’s personal priorities.
  • Look to outside experts for advice on exit and succession planning.
  • Determine the CEO’s vision and path of involvement up to the sale. This involvement is negotiable, but should remain consistent with the CEO’s vision during the negotiation.
  • What is the company’s patent position, and the value of the patents in terms of future revenue? IP produces a future revenue stream. Consider the valuation to be in the range of 4 years of IP value.

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How Do You Generate Buy-in as You Change the Business Model? Six Points

Situation: A company is changing its business model from fee for service, driven by individual contributors, to a contracted project model with teams delivering service. The driver for the new model is to deliver full solutions to meet client needs. The CEO is struggling to obtain buy-in to the new model from all stakeholders – employees, managers and shareholders. How do you generate buy-in as you change the business model?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The objective is to obtain agreement on vision and direction as the company adapts over a 3-5 year horizon.
    • Benefits include: product vs. service sales, a growing annuity revenue base, increased stability for the company and improved career paths for all members of the team.
    • Risks include: massive change, fear accompanying any change, too rapid growth, and the changes to company culture that will accompany this
  • Acknowledge and celebrate what the company and team have done well and the success that this has generated. In addition, share the lessons learned from experience to date, as well as the new opportunities that these lessons have created and the reasons to change to take advantage of these opportunities.
  • Create an exciting vision that expresses the new opportunities. Consider an off-site “WOW” event to announce your vision.
    • Focus on what’s in it for them as stakeholders. Address how they can participate in the change.
    • Where are the opportunities? Do they include investment and ownership?
    • Focus on the next major steps and the doable objectives associated with each step.
  • The new direction will require a different type of manager – with skills and experience managing teams. This is a growth opportunity for all involved. Provide training to assist the transition.
  • Employee and manager skill sets (including the CEO’s) will need to adapt – identify what skills will be needed and how they can be found or developed.
  • The past culture has been highly entrepreneurial with little middle management. The new model may be different from the current model, but it can still be entrepreneurial in a different way.

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How Do You Increase Employee Engagement? Six Suggestions

Situation: A  CEO wants to increase employee engagement throughout her family-owned company.  Performance is frequently poor, employees sometimes treat each other badly, and employees rarely put out the extra effort that could make a difference. What have others done to turn around a poor company culture? How do you increase employee engagement?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • To add some energy, for example to the accounting department, bring in AccountTemps for 3 months to bring everything up to date. This will help to establish a new level of expectation within the company. AccountTemps can also produce templates that will make it easier to stay up to date in the future. This will send a message to employees that the company is willing to invest to create new standards.
  • For those who are managing underperforming areas, link their pay to performance.
  • Leverage promising young employees by giving them more responsibility in their departments. This may facilitate a shift of resources to areas of the business needing attention.
  • Have employees make customer phone calls – to current and former customers – with instructions to listen to what the customers have to say about the company’s product and services.
    • Collect and use this information to foster a customer-oriented mindset.
    • Encourage employees to take pride in the final value delivered (or not delivered) to the customer.
  • Consider a second “Founding of the Company.” An event that will wake everyone up and reinforce both the value that they represent for the company and the company represents for them.
  • To increase cohesion within the company, create an event to bring everyone together, and help them to see and value what employees share rather than what makes them different.
    • Ask employees to put up photos of themselves at age 4-6. Ask those with children to add pictures of their kids as well. Conduct a contest is to match the photo to the employee.
    • Use special events to build a team focus at work. Examples are a company picnic with a 3-legged race or a movie and pizza at 6:00pm.

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Should You Combine Sales and Marketing? Five Points

Situation: A company is considering combining its marketing and sales teams. The company’s overall objective is to expand their marketing presence and to bring on new customers. Some team members believe that these two functions are distinct, while others believe that they should work in tandem or even be combined. What do others think about these options? Should you combine sales and marketing?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The skill sets required to create and operate an effective marketing effort are different from those required to create and operate an effective sales organization.
  • Sales and Marketing are two different sides of the same coin – they complement each other but are distinct.
  • Direction begins with the CEO; however it is imperative to make certain that everyone in the organization buys into both this direction and the organization to achieve it.
  • Some feel that it is not a good idea to have one person covering the role of Sales and Marketing. Sales is tactical while Marketing is strategic. It is Sales’ job to implement the Marketing Strategy and report back what is working and what is not. Marketing’s job is to take the feedback from Sales into account and revise the strategy accordingly.
  • Challenges which can create a constant battle between marketing and sales are due to:
    • Lack of common direction, and
    • Poor or inconsistent communication between Sales and customer on one side and Sales and Marketing on the other.
    • These challenges need to be resolved to have an effective Sales + Marketing organization.

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How Do You Plan for Geographic Expansion? Nine Points

Situation: A service company wants to expand its geographic base. It promises a 30-minute in-person response time to clients. It has established deep penetration in its existing market and sees opportunity in neighboring areas outside of its current market. How do you plan for geographic expansion?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • In many respects, the company’s situation is similar to a franchise model. It has established a successful business model. The company has also optimized its model for staff, technology, procedures, accounting and service provision. This creates the opportunity to clone the current model in a new geographic market.
  • It is important to study the competitive landscape in adjoining or more distant markets.
  • Leverage current customer references. Create a client referral incentive program among current and new customers.
  • Target initial clients within the target geography as reference clients.
  • Use direct mail to potential customers.
  • Recalibrate the company’s search engine optimization to reach the new target geography.
  • Communicate the company’s points of differentiation. Highlight customer results in the existing market to potential customers in the new market.
  • Target companies that want and need the service that the company provides. These will most likely be similar to existing clients. Experience with existing clients will serve as reference points.
  • Successfully selling function, as opposed to brand, depends on a business model that matches business volume with capacity to provide reliable service. It also assumes that market dynamics in new markets will be similar to the existing market.

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How Do You Develop and Train Leaders? Ten Suggestions

Situation: Many CEOs face challenges developing and training leaders within their ranks. What guidance can the group give to help guide them improve leadership development? How do you develop and train leaders?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • On the hiring end, pick good people and support them.
  • Empower employees and encourage self-management.
  • Constructively manage the company’s growth rate rather than just “grow as much as you can.” Some growth rates are unsustainable.
    • Estimate the risks and rewards.
    • Consider the pros and cons of growth and manage growth to maximize the pros while minimizing the cons.
  • Respect personality types – not everyone is or wants to be a potential leader.
  • Mentoring – pair leadership candidates with proven leaders.
  • “Response to error” is one of the key values to define. If errors are always used to evaluate individuals, people tend to hide their mistakes or deflect blame. If errors are viewed as a “company resource”, people are more willing to bring them out into the open. Furthermore properly addressing errors are the best opportunity for correction and improvement.
  • Design the compensation system to reward both innovation and leadership.
    • Focus rewards on long-term results. For example, reward sales people on follow-up and quality of service or product actually delivered rather than on just booking the sale.
    • Align rewards with company culture and objectives. This may include profits, sales and production. Alternatives to consider – team vs. individual goals and bonuses, process improvement vs. focus on dollars, and percent of salary represented by bonus or award.
  • Ask the employees what is important to them. Don’t try to guess.
  • Evaluate and adjust the company’s career growth opportunities.
  • Make management thoughts and goals visible. Mentor the next level of management by demonstrating executive thought patterns rather than just sharing the final decision.

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How Do You Manage Growth? Six Points

Situation: Many companies face challenges managing growth. Growth is a complex process involving strategy, staff and company culture. What guidance can the group give to help guide planning for growth? How do you manage growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Think of growth in term of five major components of organization and growth: structural, cultural, facilities, documentation systems, and people.
  • Structural
    • Consider different ownership and profit sharing options. Look for options that fit the objectives of the company.
    • If you are looking at multi-location solutions, develop a structure that can be easily copied in new locations that are added but which is complementary to the home office structure.
  • Cultural
    • If the business is family-run and looking at moving to a non-family structure, look for options that will preserve the best aspects of the culture as it has developed.
    • Keep company values intact.
    • Focus on maintaining engagement and commitment.
  • Facilities
    • The transition from single-site to multiple-site is particularly traumatic. The jump from 2-sites to 3-sites is much easier because an effective model is already in place.
  • Documentation Systems
    • Growth can compel the company to adopt entirely new systems, especially when passing certain thresholds for government regulations (i.e. 50+ employees).
  • People
    • Hire and retain for the right mindset – consistent with company culture and structure.
    • Specialists can be a real asset for their particular talents, but they seldom have the view of the “big picture” that is required for a turbulent environment.
    • Compensation – align compensation with company culture and priorities.
    • “Ownership” may have to change from sole ownership to shared ownership in order to keep key talent engaged.
    • Add new skill sets to address needs but assure that these complement existing skill sets.

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How Do You Manage Long-Term Members of the Team? Three Strategies

Situation: A company has a team that built their critical systems some time ago. The CEO is upgrading skills and adding new team members to update these systems to current technology. The challenge is that the original team members don’t see the need to update the company’s systems.  How does the CEO help them to see the benefit of upgrades? How do you manage long-term members of the team?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Given the company’s values of loyalty between company and employees, it’s not possible to just shoot these people. Given them the opportunity to remain valuable to the company. Be patient
  • If there is friction between the employees who have been with the company for a long time and the newcomers, make them work things out. Don’t try to fix it.
    • Be public about company and team objectives, expectations and timelines. Explain where and why the company is going and the potential benefit to them and to the company.
    • It will be messy at first. There is risk. However, these are mature individuals and the new people come in with a great deal of experience, so this may mitigate the risk.
    • As necessary, work one-on-one with individuals. Make it clear what is and is not acceptable behavior; for example, sniping at each other and spreading discontent.
    • Where obvious conflict occurs, have the individuals involved go talk it out over a beer. Let them know that they are expected to be able to handle and resolve their differences.
    • Don’t let individuals become destructive. If necessary, put individual long-termers in roles that are not obstructive to new initiatives.
  • Some long-termers may leave on their own and solve the problem. It will become obvious who they are.

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How Do You Boost Team Morale? Ten Suggestions

Situation: A CEO is concerned because he anticipates an increase in stress within his team – from handling clients who are anxious about the economy on the downside to a potentially overwhelming number of new clients to manage as people start to reinvest in growth as the economy improves. How do you boost team morale?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Help team members to prepare for additional pressure:
    • Communicate with them as a team, and individually as necessary, about what the company anticipates to be the new challenge. Do this with a positive tone.
    • Be open with the team about the realities that they may face, and have the team work together during weekly meetings to develop solutions that will help to reduce the pressure as it builds.
    • Make stressors positive. Bringing on new clients is wonderful for the firm, will increase profitability and the opportunity for profit sharing.
  • What have others done to successfully maintain employee morale and increase productivity?
    • Reward programs for people who learn new processes or develop new skills. The real reward isn’t the cash, but recognition by the CEO, who makes a big deal about the reward.
    • Monthly or quarterly drawings for a cash price. Employees can increase their odds of winning because the number of tickets that an individual has in the hat is driven by accomplishments against criteria set each period.
    • Monthly barbeque lunch for the whole company. This promotes camaraderie, and encourages people to talk to one another about things other than business.
    • Project-based bonuses – tied to individual contribution.
    • Spot bonus or gift cards – allowing employees to recognize each other’s’ contributions.
    • Post individual “win” achievements on a bulletin board in the break room. This injects fun competition into day-to-day work.
  • Develop a list similar to the suggestions, above, and ask employees what type of recognition and pressure relievers they would like to see – bring them into the decision.

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