Tag Archives: Consistency

How Do You Find and Train Staff for Satellite Offices? Five Points

Situation: A company plans to grow from a single site to additional distant sites. The CEO has two concerns: how to bring in the new people, and how to preserve the culture that they have developed as they build new sites. How do you find and train staff for satellite offices?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • First, how does the company currently identify customer targets?
    • Typically the company targets specific personnel within a potential client who will be decision makers or influencers on the company’s projects. Market developers then build relationships with these individuals.
  • Points of focus in selecting employees in other geographic areas.
    • What will be the office configuration? Likely 3-4 individuals, including an engineer, office manager and project manager.
    • Promote the company as the preferred place to work in the new locations. Offer signing bonuses for employees who identify and bring in new people, as well as for the new employees.
  • Does the company anticipate that maintaining company culture will be a challenge as the company expands? Yes.
    • Train new employees in the home office for one month to help them understand the culture. Immerse them in a project so that they experience the work ethic.
    • Have current personnel serve short term stints in the new offices. This will help to build consistency of service and delivery between the offices.
  • What is the best way to recover from a service challenge?
    • Occasionally we all make mistakes. Don’t miss the opportunity that “service recovery” presents to strengthen relationships with clients.
    • A competent and timely response to a problem situation can create an indelible impression on the client.
  • What else can the company do to improve its marketing?
    • Assure that there is an existing cost calculator in each remote site. This speeds response without having to wait for decisions from the main office.
    • Install a traffic plug-in on the webpage for each remote site and feature this on the site webpage. This allows current and potential customers to schedule their visits to their convenience.

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What is Appropriate Compensation for a Founder CEO? Four Points

Situation: A founder CEO established her company with a significant personal loan, which is being repaid. To compensate herself for the original investment, she is considering several options including an employee stock option plan (ESOP) through which employees would be able to establish ownership of a certain percent of the company. What is appropriate compensation for a founder CEO?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The critical question is: what is the CEO’s goal? The next question is – what options best serve to achieve goal?
    • If the goal is long-term goal is maintaining or increasing current income combined with long-term security – like a Trust Fund – seek the counsel of a financial advisor who can help model how the options under consideration will satisfy the goal.
    • This individual can also evaluate the tax advantages associated with various options.
  • Is there a clear exit strategy in place?
    • Every company needs a written exit strategy, as well as a plan to put this strategy into action.
    • The simple existence of a strategy and a plan does not preclude adjusting either the strategy or the plan as conditions or opportunities change.
  • There are two important corollary points:
    • Having a strategy and plan is the only way to build a structure of accountability within the company; and
    • Recalling a lesson from Jim Collins’s book, Good to Great, the successful companies selected a solid strategy and stuck with it; the less successful comparators continually changed strategy and never allowed momentum to build.
  • To assist establishing an exit strategy, seek the advice of one or two consultants. There are several highly qualified exit advisors that can be researched through current professional contacts or via the Internet.

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How Do You Build Consistency and Reliability as You Scale Up? Three Keys

Interview with Greg Hartwell, CEO and Managing Director, Homecare California, Inc.

Situation: Fast growing companies find it difficult to manage consistency and reliability of service as they scale to their next level of growth. They need to systematize what works and leverage technology to enjoy the benefits of scale. How do you build consistency and reliability as you scale up?

Advice from Greg Hartwell:

  • Invest time and effort to build an experienced management team. As a small company building a new service delivery model, it is helpful for the founders to know all roles so that you have a sense of what’s needed for each role.
    • Be open to hiring people from other industries. This brings a fresh perspective and broadens the pool of talent. There’s value in industry experience, but attitude and cultural fit are key.
    • The split between tactical and strategic skills is 80 / 20. Basic skills are necessary, but specialized knowledge can be learned.
  • Institutionalize how you recruit, screen, hire, train and retain. How do you do it like Disney – attracting and hiring the best of the best?
    • Know your market and the personality of those who will excel. This greatly simplifies the screening process.
    • Work hard on training. Our customer-focus starts with our employees. We complement natural talent with training that focuses on soft skills, and on consistency and reliability of service.
    • Find great advisors who can help build a training and retention system that works for you.
    • Minimize turnover by compensating people well, and treating them even better. Build a culture of recognition and shared experience that emphasizes the importance of the team and its members.
  • Embrace technology which enhances your ability to scale.
    • Don’t wait for something bad to happen and then rush to fix it. Anticipate and prevent mishaps.
    • Leverage communication technologies to tighten the bond between client and provider agency. Provide added services that are valuable and affordable.
    • Hand-held device technology is developing rapidly. Leverage this to increase consistency and reliability of service, enhance case reporting, reduce human error, reduce the ratio of supervisors to caregivers, and increase productivity. Be at the head of your industry class!

You can contact Greg Hartwell at [email protected], www.homecare-california.com

Key Words: Fast, Growth, Consistency, Reliability, System, Technology, Benefit, Management, Requirement, Talent, Recruit, Hire, Train

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How Do You Help Managers Think Bigger? Four Guidelines

Situation: A company is transitioning from a time and materials to a fixed price bid model. Estimators and project leads find this transition difficult. We need them to think like business managers. How do you help managers to see and think in terms of the big picture?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • First, set up a framework that repositions projects in a business framework.
    • All projects are business go/no decisions with expenses, minimum profitability targets, and incentives provided for beating initial projections.
    • This will help generate more consistency in bids and final gross margins per project.
  • Next, teach managers and employees industry and company standards within your new model.
    • Do post-mortems on all projects. Did we make or lose money versus initial estimate? How much? How did we perform against estimated time and expense? Were client expectations met? Were they exceeded? What was good or bad about the project? Were there errors in the original estimates? Where could we have saved cost?
    • Use this information to improve your estimating process over time.
  • You have a long history of T&M projects. Categorize these by project type. Look at the hours required to complete the projects – both engineering and management time – as well as other costs. Establish range and averages within each category.
    • Look for key variables among the project categories: scope of project, learning curves, efficiency of team members.
    • Work through known costs and outcomes on past projects as examples to teach the process.
    • For new projects, calculate best, medium and worst case hours and costs. Bid based on your worst case as you develop your learning curve.
    • Make sure to include a project management fee on top of your T&M estimates. Eventually you want to develop an overhead percentage to cover project management.
  • Team your estimator with the project lead both for project input, and performance against the bid.
    • Evaluate and compensate both based on project outcome.
    • The critical measure will be gross margin generated versus gross margin estimated on the project.

Key Words: Leadership, Project, Time and Materials, Fixed Price, Bid, Framework, Consistency, Standards, Variables, Estimator, Lead, Incentive

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What are the Strategic Components of a Marketing Plan?

Interview with Sanjay Sathe, President & CEO, RiseSmart.com

Situation: RiseSmart’s top opportunities are to increase visibility and gain market share. What are the most important strategic components of an effective marketing program?

Advice:

  • The best marketing plans don’t start with your company, product or service, They start with a focus on your customers, and the benefits you can deliver to them.
  • That means your first step should be to identify who your customers are.
    • This can be challenging in B2B businesses. For example, with RiseSmart’s outplacement solution, Transition Concierge, we have several possible customers: the HR department at the company seeking outplacement services; the CFO at these companies; the HR department at companies seeking good candidates; and the individuals who are going through outplacement and seeking new positions.
    • Each of these audiences has different objectives, priorities and approaches. To succeed, we need to connect to each of them where they are.
  • After you have identified your target customers, the next step is to develop messaging and message delivery systems that capture and maintain their attention.
    • Your messaging must express a differentiation that is easy to grasp – something that clearly sets you apart from your competition.  In technology marketing, Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial, with its man-versus-machine contrast, is one of the most famous examples of this.
    • Your campaign must consistently touch your potential customer base. Research suggests that this requires a minimum of 4-5 touches to effectively gain customer attention and communicate your message.
    • Accompanying the messaging and the increased visibility that you seek, you must have an effective way to respond promptly and directly to customer interest or inquiries. Rapid and responsive follow-up are critical to success.

You can contact Sanjay Sathe at [email protected]

Key Words: Market Share, Visibility, Customer, Message, Differentiation, Consistency, Touches, Follow-up  [like]