Tag Archives: Increase

How Do You Redefine the Top Executive’s Role in the Business? Four Points

Situation: The President of a family-owned business that has been in operation for over 30 years wishes to change her role by increasing delegation of responsibility and accountability within the business in preparation for her eventual retirement. Other family members in the business are happy with their current responsibilities and are resistant to taking on more responsibility. What advice does the group have for this member?
Advice from the CEOs:
• Given that you are preparing for retirement, it is important to let others know about your plans and your desire to increasingly hand off your responsibilities to others. Ideally, one or more of the others will express a desire to take on more leadership, particularly if it includes a boost in pay.
• It is important to clarify responsibilities and prioritize which ones you wish to hand off. Once this is done build and execute a hand-off plan.
• Transition current managers who are misplaced in their position to other roles. Work with them to identify alternate roles where their talents can better benefit the company. They may be aware of their current discomfort and welcome the opportunity to take on a different role more suited to their abilities.
• Focus on removing barriers to delegation that may be in place. For example, bring others into the discussion and review the projects that they are overseeing. Identify the challenges underlying those projects and ask for their suggestions on how to address these. Don’t provide the answers. Ask questions and push them to develop appropriate solutions.

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How Do You Balance Competitive and Collegial Behavior Within The Team? Three Points

Situation: A CEO has built a company which is very collegial. She is interested in adding an element of friendly competition within the company. Would it be destructive to add an aspect of competition to the mix? How do you balance competitive and collegial behavior within the team?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • This can be achieved by focusing on recognition, and encouraging recognition of each other among the team members.
  • One example is to have traveling trophies.
    • One trophy could be circulated on a periodic basis based on measurable criteria. Examples include new client acquisition, increases in revenue, or increases in savings by improving processes. There are many positive achievements that can be recognized.
    • A second trophy could be awarded for “assists”. Examples include one team member helping another to land new accounts, a team of employees developing a cost-saving improvement to process, and developing a new accounting technique that saves the company money.
    • A third trophy could be awarded to one team member for a job well done, and then awarded by that member to another member for another job well done, and so on.
  • To add to the collegiality, some of the trophies can be passed around spontaneously for on-the-spot recognition. Others can be awarded on a scheduled basis such as annual or quarterly employee or company meetings. Mix it up and be sure to make it fun!

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How Do You Boost the Performance of a Life Sciences Company? Six Suggestions

Situation: The CEO wants to improve the performance of her life sciences company. She has questions about the business plan and roles within the company. She is also looking for better ways to connect with current and potential customers. How do you boost the performance of a life sciences company?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Assess both your own role and the company to ensure that there is good alignment between the business plan and the roles within the company.
  • Be strategic after assessing the company’s needs and situation. Too often companies jump to tactical considerations because they are action oriented. To be effective, tactics must align with the broader company strategy.
  • Build a foundation based on value and compliment this with effective models to communicate and leverage this value base.
  • Think outside the box. Consider options to use or increase the effectiveness of social networking. This has growing dramatically in importance as a way to reach and communicate with key current and potential constituencies.
  • Perception is important. Be aware of what others think of the company and work creatively to present the company in a light that will support objectives.
  • The visual cortex represents 75% of sensory awareness. Leverage this on web sites and in marketing campaigns.

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How Do You Quantify Niche Market Potential? Five Suggestions

Situation: A CEO’s company focuses on a specialized niche market. One of his challenges is that there is little public or chamber of commerce information available on the size and characteristics of their market. How do you quantify niche market potential?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Define the product / service very specifically. To narrow and refine estimates of market size look for the low hanging fruit.
    • What are the high growth segments of the target market?
    • What are the high growth industries of the target market?
  • To determine whether the market opportunity is $100M or $500M:
    • Define the company’s market more clearly – particularly the initial beachhead market where there is the potential to gain the most traction.
    • Recognize that there may be two markets: a high end market – relatively low gross sales dollars but high margins, and a low end mass market – relatively high gross sales but low margins.
  • Contact the originators of available market data to get their assumptions, comparative data and any other findings that may not be published but are beneficial.
  • Work closely with customers to build category / industry revenue estimates.
    • Segment the most active customers and increase the company’s share of their purchases.
    • Develop web site transaction capabilities to offer the company’s line as an adjunct to customers’ web sales.
    • Establish a Customer Council or Round Table to better understand the market dynamics and to differentiate the company within the market.
  • Sell the product and services’ features and benefits to the C-level, not just to engineers.
    • Sell to the CEO / CFO focusing on increasing shareholder wealth.
    • Determine a return rate for conversion to the company’s technology.
    • Reach out to professional segments that will naturally see value in the company’s process.
    • Seek an exclusive relationship with an industry leader to quickly launch new products.

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How Do You Manage Seasonal Gaps in Project Flow? Five Options

Situation: A company experiences seasonal gaps in project flow. This makes it difficult to project both cash flow and staffing needs into the future. In addition, monthly cash flow tends to be uneven. What can they do to improve control of internal and external resources in this environment? How do you manage seasonal gaps in project flow?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The company currently focuses 60% on consulting and 40% on internal projects, some of which produce future projects. Relative proportions shift over time, and projects can be cancelled.
  • Try to write the company’s contracts to push revenue to early stages of a project, so that there is more cash cushion to help ride out short cash periods.
  • Look for options to change the business model to increase financial flexibility.
    • If there are significant margin differentials between different types of projects this has overhead implications when resources are shifted.
    • Look for ways to allocate less expensive resources or virtual resources with a lower cost to lower margin projects. Look for opportunities to utilize remote resources if these resources cost less.
  • Adjust staff assignments to maximize payoff, as well as staff retention options. Look for project work opportunities.
  • Analyze and evaluate the ability to switch personnel between paying projects and internal development projects.

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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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How Do You Adjust to Tight Cash Situations? Eight Options

Situation: A company is faced with a tight cash situation. A combination of increased interest rates, a business slowdown, and slow deliveries from suppliers have contributed to this. The CEO needs to find ways to stretch available cash, or to rely on other alternatives to assure that commitments are delivered to clients. How do you adjust to tight cash situations?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • One company actively and consistently uses their bank line of credit to cover end of quarter payables. They pay this down promptly as cash comes in.
  • Profit sharing represents 20 -25% of another company’s total compensation. When profits are down this gives them some cushion because payouts are lower.
  • One company maintains frequent and open communication with their vendors. This makes it easier to get them to work with the company when cash is tight.
  • Another company has vastly increased sales activity. This has helped to improve the business pipeline, and this in turn improves the story that they can tell their bank and vendors. It helps to reassure them that they are a good partner and a good credit risk when cash is tight.
  • It’s a good idea to maintain regular contact with the company’s best funnel clients – the ones who bring in new business. As a result if their competitors are struggling then they get a shot at their business.
  • It is better to cut select people than to put a large number of people on extended reduced time. Hard as it is to let people go, this is better for morale.
  • For less skilled operations work, one company used to use temp workers. When they’ve discussed the need to cut back with permanent employees and asked about this work, they were told that they could cover this work in their available time. The team really pulled together and were grateful for the opportunity to remain full-time.
  • Another company continues to model their pipeline, and plans for adjustments in customer demand. This enables them to act sooner rather than later when adjustments are needed.

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How Do You Maintain a Culture Focused on Quality? Five Points

Situation: Quality is a CEO’s #1 objective for his company. As the company has grown and processes have become more complex with more people involved, consistent quality is becoming an issue. The CEO wants to refocus and reestablish a quality culture to support future growth. What have others done to increase the quality of their product or service? How do you maintain a culture focused on quality?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Trust is a company’s most important commodity. This trumps financial exposure. In case described, the client trusts the company to produce and deliver a quality service upon which they can rely.
  • Go all of the way back into system design – or how any particular product system is set up.
    • Assemble a diverse group to review both the company’s deliverables and the system inputs.
    • Brainstorm everything that can break.
    • Prioritize the list based on potential exposure to the company.
    • Do a deep-dive analysis of the top 5 or 10 exposure areas.
    • Reprioritize after the deep dive has been completed.
    • Fix all issues identified in order of exposure.
    • Repeat the exercise periodically to assure that quality is maintained.
  • Empower and reward anyone who develops improvements in quality control.
  • Shield the company from any exposure over which it has no control. This can be accomplished through language in the company’s service agreements, and through language covering service deliverables.
  • Once the company has shielded itself from an exposure, set up flags in the monitoring systems that will alert the company of events or situations that will impact clients. This allows the company to inform clients of situations that may impact them without making recommendations as to how the client should handle the situation.

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How Do You Build a New Channel? Four Cases

Situation: A company wants to increase business by building a new channel. The new business is different from the company’s base business, but won’t change the company’s focus on its base business. What lessons have been learned by other CEOs who have accomplished this? How do you build a new channel?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • One company created a new channel without changing the base business.
    • They responded slowly to the opportunity before deciding to change.
    • They needed to change infrastructure by adding more people.
    • They also needed to redefine the offering to meet the needs of new clients.
    • This involved adding additional data which had been accessible previously but hadn’t been presented.
    • At first the hand off wasn’t smooth. Hiccups that could have been foreseen with more planning were extra data fields and rough hand-offs. Future new releases will focus on improved process review and more challenging of assumptions, and more patience in the scoping stage.
  • The second company created a new branch with different products and operations, but maintained one financial and inventory management system.
    • The initial produce was sold and installed, utilizing union labor. The new product is sold wholesale business to businesses and is non-union.
    • After struggling with attempts to house both operations under one roof the new operation was moved to a separate location.
    • This enabled company to set up separate operations and to fully understand the financials of both operations. It also makes it easier to assess the viability of each business and to implement changes in one without disrupting the other.
  • The third company created a new offering to sell to the same customer base, with no change in the back-end systems.
    • The new business created an insurance model for the company’s services as an alternative to the original break-fix model.
    • The two systems use a common sales team, network engineers, and back-end system. Customers choose either insurance or break-fix.
    • The challenge was that the two models need completely different monitoring and incentive systems for the engineers. This took time for development and training.
  • The fourth company created two production operations: turnkey and component.
    • This called for different sales and contracting processes and separate production areas on the plant floor, with clear delineation but using the same back end, financial, and engineering support systems.
    • The component process is short-run, high value, high margin; the turnkey is high volume runs, lower value, low margin.
    • The challenge has been in setting up a new set of contract agreements and monitoring systems to monitor the financial success of the turnkey operation.
  • What is the common thread?
    • Put sufficient time into planning and evaluating options and challenges so that there is a solid understanding of the new channel before starting.

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How Do You Balance Scalable Growth with Quality Service? Five Thoughts

Situation: A CEO wants to determine whether and to what extent his company’s service model is scalable. He wants to determine whether it is possible to add additional clients by adjusting the ratio of clients to staff. The tricky part is determining whether the company can increase the client to staff ratio while minimizing the impact on client service. This is critical because client service is the company’s “secret sauce”. How do you balance scalable growth with quality service?

  • Start by profiling the current client base from high to low maintenance. For example, set up a grid with axes of sophistication and frequency of desired contact as follows:
    • A – unsophisticated and desire frequent contact
    • B – sophisticated and desire frequent contact
    • C – unsophisticated and desire infrequent contact
    • D – sophisticated and desire infrequent contact
  • Analyze the client base and assign each current or new client to category A, B, C or D.
  • Distribute client relationships so that no member of the team has too many A’s. This may make it possible to assign more clients to each staff member.
  • Also consider matching staff to client type. Some staff may be better working with unsophisticated clients, while others are more adept with sophisticated clients.
  • As this model is developed and built, try different alternatives for matching staff to clients. This can help to identify additional alternatives for achieving the company’s objective.

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