Tag Archives: Support

How Do You Effectively Manage Your To-Do List? Five Recommendations

Situation: A company recently downsized. The CEO and sales staff are overburdened by administrative and business development tasks. What’s the best way to bring to add resources to support sales and infrastructure? How do you effectively manage your to-do list?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Look at what hats you and others are wearing. Wear the hats that fit best and take off the others. If an activity is not core to company success, off-load it. For example: look at your bookkeeping, shipping and receiving, records and basic correspondence. These are necessary, but don’t generate revenue.
  • If your core businesses are sales and service, is one more profitable than the other? Can you outsource pieces of the less profitable activity short-term?
  • Where do you want to be personally in the next two years? On what roles do you want to focus? Build a plan to transition yourself into these roles. The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber is a quick read that outlines the process.
  • You may not need to bring in a high level operations manager. Consider hiring an office manager to help organize both you and your business development staff. For a smaller operation, this person can take care of phones, bookkeeping, shipping and receiving and routine correspondence. This will allow executive staff and sales to focus on growing and servicing customer demand.
  • During the summer months hire high school or college summer interns. They provide an inexpensive source of labor, high levels of energy and creativity, and are eager for work experience. Some of these individuals may become future employees.

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How Do You Outsource IT? Seven Suggestions

Situation: Fast growing companies often find it difficult to scale internal IT management to keep pace with database (dB) growth. There are typically 1-3 people in charge of dB management in a small to medium-sized business. Crisis hits when there is an abrupt system shutdown for up to 48 hours and a significant disruption to company operations. How can this be avoided? How do you outsource IT?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The difficulty is that small infrastructure teams often don’t have the range of skills to diagnose dB issues. Calling Oracle, SAP, etc. for assistance gets expensive fast.
  • One option is to outsource business intelligence and dB management to a specialist. Quality offshore resources exist that can take over support of company business information (BI) and dB management, offering a full suite of services from anti-virus to preventative diagnosis of subtle misalignments.
  • For example, InstaDB replicates the dB in a remote data center so that they can monitor the system for errors, develop solutions, and remotely resolves errors with no interruption to users.
  • In addition, some outsourced specialists include calls to Oracle, SAP and so forth as necessary to resolve problems at no cost to the client.
  • In a pilot study in a company with 5 servers, the offshore outsource partner provided a full suite of services and was able to increase uptime from 95-97% on a daily basis to 99.97%. This level of performance should be the goal.
  • Your outsource provider should have 24/7/365 support services.
  • Your provider should provide you with a service-level agreement (SLA) prioritizing issues so that the most critical issues are resolved fastest.

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How Do You On-board a New CFO – Four Imperatives

Situation: A company is hiring their first CFO. Previously, as a small company the founder and an accountant handled this responsibility. How do they integrate this key person into the company? How do you on-board a new CFO?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The company and its key players should reflect the values, needs and desires of the CEO. The talents of the CEO and CFO should complement each other. Have a clear discussion and agreement with the CFO candidate on values, role, and organizational structure before hiring or announcing anything to the company.
  • Recommended announcements and timeline: When the new CFO is announced, simultaneously present the new organization chart with broad responsibilities, but not with detailed position descriptions. Set a timeline for realignment of roles. It is not necessary to specify exact roles at the time of the announcement. Let everyone know that this is a work in progress and give a time frame within which all will be resolved.
  • Once the CFO is in place, the CEO and CFO should meet at least weekly to assure that the CFO has the support and resources needed to accomplish his/her responsibilities. All decisions within the CFO’s group, personnel responsibilities and any shifts in roles should come from the CFO, with the support of the CEO. This will help the new CFO to assimilate into the company more rapidly and will give him/her the authority needed to manage his/her organization.
  • The CEO may put the CFO in charge of areas that they want to delegate – accounting, administration, finance and contracts. The CEO should remain involved in banking relationships.

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How Do You Sell an Annual Plan? Five Points

Situation: A CEO has developed an annual plan. She wants ideas on the best way to communicate the plan to staff, secure buy-in and create accountability for execution. How do you sell an annual plan?

Advice of the CEOs:

  • Communicate your vision for the company and the future as a broad outline so that employees know how they can contribute. Create a picture so that they can see and support your vision. Ask for input on how to implement the plan. Since they will be doing the work, the best way to generate buy-in and accountability is for them to own the implementation plan.
  • You don’t have to share all details of the plan with everyone. If you communicate the plan in parts to those who will implement them, tailor the message to the person, and create individual objectives that will support the overall plan. Connect achievement of objectives to job evaluations.
  • Limit the number of objectives for each person – three key objectives plus one personal development objective. Have each employee develop activities to support achievement of their objectives.
  • Once objectives are in place, conduct regular meetings to review progress against plan and objectives, identify performance obstacles and solutions, and to reinforce the overall vision. The vision must be simple and direct. Consistently repeat and reinforce the message. Publicly recognize individual contributions that support the vision.
  • Establish metrics to track progress toward the vision. Stay on message with each person – focus on their goals and contributions. Be consistent in your words and actions and use them to reinforce the vision.

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How Do You Replace a Key Position? Four Points

Situation: The CEO is moving a key employee from head of engineering to a more customer development focus. To support this, she will have to bring in or promote another employee to fill the position of leader/supervisor/manager of the engineering group. The CEO seeks advice on the best way to approach finding a replacement for this key job. How do you replace a key position?
Advice from the CEOs:
• First, it is necessary to develop a timeline for finding and transitioning the replacement. Realistically, count on 6 months to find a replacement and transition the responsibilities to a new person.
• Keep in mind that anybody you find or promote will be different from the individual who currently occupies the position, and will not handle their new responsibilities the same way as the current individual. Their motivation and their approach to their new responsibilities will be different, at least at the outset, and they will not handle their responsibilities the same way that the current individual does.
• Seek an individual, either currently within the company or an outside hire with strengths that, over time, will add significant value to the organization. Prepare for this by brainstorming and developing a profile of the ideal candidate.
• If you have qualified candidates, the ideal person will come from within the organization. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to other employees that they, also, may become candidates for future positions to grow both their skills and income.

How Do You Jump-Start Sales in the New Year? Four Points

Situation: A CEO has been working with his team to jump-start sales to set the company on a positive growth path. His team has come up with some interesting ideas. He would like to hear from others as to what they have done to set their companies up for a year of positive growth. How do you jump-start sales in the new year?
Advice from the CEOs:
• Set up a focused, manageable revenue target list of 30-100 existing and desirable new clients. Focus sales efforts on these clients. This is much more effective than a shotgun approach.
• Touch-up and refresh the target list on a consistent basis. Create and lay out a schedule of contacts by email, telephone or meetings and stick to it.
• Schedule regular meetings with the team to share successes and insights gained from their efforts. Compliment this by awarding points and recognition for the best contributions to the meetings. Rather than deciding on the awards yourself, have the team vote on the best contributions. This will increase the camaraderie of the team and will encourage them to support each other
• Develop a focused network to link to former colleagues. For example, if you’ve worked at other companies join or create an alumni group for those individuals on Linked-in. This can develop unexpected new opportunities.

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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 Attract Investment to a Small Company? Four Perspectives

Situation: A small company seeks outside investment to support its growth. The company’s industry is dominated by large, well-recognized players. These companies have historically been the company’s customers; however, they have a quarterly mindset, and are increasingly looking to support their own development groups. How do you attract investment to a small company?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • What is the company’s ROI and risk profile?
    • Positive ROI, particularly taking advantage of new distribution channels.
    • ROI turnaround is typically 1-2 years.
    • There are about 50 similar companies in the market.
    • The company possesses intellectual property that makes it appealing.
    • Project maturity is generally considered a risk in the industry – it is not as experienced or mature as other industries.
    • An additional risk is that new developments in online distribution are continually changing the industry environment in unpredictable ways.
  • Investigate and approach companies in other industries with similar structures – dominated by large players but with a healthy presence of smaller companies. Examples include the movie industry and real estate pools.
    • Talk to investors who are familiar with these industries to see whether they would be interested in investing in the company’s projects.
  • There is a good deal of money out there looking to beat the current returns available through the stock market and paper investments. Look for an angel investor.
  • Given the Risk/Reward structure of the industry, approaching professional investors may be the best bet for the company.

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What are the Consequences of Not Meeting Goals? Four Points

Situation: A company recently established a weekly objectives program. Weekly objectives are set on Monday, with reminders to complete objectives for the week sent by email on Thursday. However, some team members are failing to meet goals for the previous week and want to roll over previous week’s unmet objectives to the new week. Should there be consequences for failing to meet stated objectives? If so, what is the best method to phase these in? What are the consequences of not meeting goals?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Track which objectives are being met and which are not. Measure the impact of not meeting objectives on original timelines. Assess the depth of the problem.
  • Watch the process for four weeks. At the weekly meeting following the end of the four weeks, discuss the process as a team.
    • What’s working and what is not?
    • Are realistic objectives being set?
    • If objectives are not being met, is there something that regularly interferes with objective completion?
    • Are monthly or quarterly objectives at risk as a result?
    • Reset and reestablish expectations for the following four weeks as a team. Raise the bar for compliance, as a team, as you mature the process.
  • If any team member shows signs of chronic difficulty meeting weekly objectives, meet 1-on-1 to assess the situation and reset expectations.
  • Discussion builds team support of the process and adds a layer of peer-pressure to prompt individuals to improve their consistency in meeting weekly objectives.

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How Do You Improve Your Time Management Skills? Four Recommendations

Situation: A CEO is finding that reduction in staff over the last two years combined with expansion of business have left her in a quandary trying to manage too much. While the prospects of bring in new staff are improving, she wants to improve her time management skills to support company growth. How do you improve your time management skills?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Delegation and communication around delegation is about “monkey” management – getting the monkeys off you back and onto the backs of others. In addition, it’s about not letting others put inappropriate monkeys on your back.
  • Think about the difference between:
    • Empowerment versus involving yourself in all aspects of the business.
    • Empowerment is more effective and frees up time to focus on new opportunities and growth.
    • Involving yourself everywhere quickly leads to a time crunch and is less effective.
  • Set quarterly goals for yourself, just as you set quarterly goals for the company. This drives achievement and growth. It helps you to:
    • Clarify your role – where you should be focusing your time, and to
    • Let go.
  • Think of your staff as your customers. Like customers, the more you give and recognize them, the more they love you. Effectively, this is serving your staff just as you serve customers. This is called Servant Leadership and builds both empowered employees and great employee loyalty.

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