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Bruce Piasecki

New World Companies: The Future Of Capitalism

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How does a good company generate value in society? How do the leaders of these new world companies reshape and remake our families’ available goods, our friendship networks, and the many smaller firms that support them?

As a management consultant to over a hundred firms in the last thirty years, my team and I have worked with global companies such as Toyota, Suncor, Siemens, and FedEx, to name a few, to help them transform into new world companies – companies ready to take on the challenges of today’s global economy. In doing this, I derived a way to describe how companies mature by seeing the process as a symbolic clock of corporate competitiveness. As this concept evolved, I came to focus not on the clock itself, but on what it represents: time. Furthermore, I’ve broken down the time periods into segments that represent significant stages in the life of a global business. I often refer to these timeframes as “urgencies,” because, as I view it, corporations must accomplish the business goals outlined within each time period if they are to be successful.

Throughout the years, I have revised my description of these timeframes in a company’s life to take into account the emergence of what I call social response capitalism. I became increasingly aware of the financial ramifications of social response capitalism while working with new world companies. I came to see how each company contributes to this most important new business movement in decades, and why this evolution is crucial to the health of any company – whether a large global corporation or a small regional family business.

[wcm_restrict]The Six Timeframes of a Company’s Life

The first of the six timeframes in the life of a company can be summarized by the term “profit margin improvement.” Increasing revenues and profits is of primary significance for success in this initial stage.

During the second timeframe of a company’s life, business practices must focus on improving efficiency in the areas of manufacturing, distribution, and sales. The essentials of efficient manufacturing include improving the automation of the manufacturing process, and finding outsourcers who can reduce production costs. A company’s sales and distribution may produce as much as 80 percent of its profits. What has become known as distribution channel realignment is a crucial area in which companies can significantly enhance performance. This may include strategies such as broadening networks, reducing transportation costs, and improving customer service.

Enhanced performance expedites the third stage of a company’s life: expansion of its global customer base. Successful companies must develop globally if they hope to remain competitive. Expansion may not be the “mother” of invention, but it certainly is the “sibling.”

Presuming a company progresses to a successful third phase – and only a few do – its fourth stage must focus on product differentiation. In the extremely competitive environment of global business, companies must continually increase the recognizability of their products against those of their competitors. Once this goal is attained, the corporation enters the fifth stage – reducing risk factors for investors. Whatever companies produce, they must do so with fewer financial and operational risks than their competitors.

The sixth and final stage of a successful global business focuses on environmental, social, and governance practices – three areas of concern that lie outside company operations. This recently evolved step involves a company’s efforts in responding to the social concerns of its customers and clients; having these actions recognized by the analysts and investment managers who assess its likelihood of success.

This is social response capitalism. One of the most significant ways of evaluating a company’s prospects and performance rests with its social products differentiation. This involves the assimilation of “social response values” into its products and services. Throughout the years – as I’ve refined my approach to corporate success by adding social concerns as measurable criteria – I’ve come to realize that this sixth stage is necessary not only for corporate success, but also for corporate survival.

Unless a firm takes into account the profound changes that have become part of the new global corporate culture, it can neither thrive nor can it survive.

Circle of Urgencies[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Bruce PiaseckiBruce Piasecki, PhD, is president and founder of AHC Group, Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in energy, materials, and environmental corporate matters, and is author of New World Companies: The Future of Capitalism. This article is adapted from material in his new book.

For more information visit ahcgroup.com.

Follow the Green Lights – Small Business Success is a Mixture of Strategy and Intuition

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Work is life and life is work for small business owners. The lines are blurred between work and everything else — family, friends, faith and self. It is not always easy to balance the demands of business ownership and living a powerful purpose driven life. To have the best of both we have to rely on our resources, our experience, our talents, skills, and take advantage of all our opportunities. Yes, it’s that simple. To succeed as a small business, simply engage a few basic strategies and follow the ‘green lights’.

Of the approximately 543,000 new small businesses that start each month, only 50% will survive 5 or more years. Small business ownership is a life and a lifestyle that the owner chooses. It offers everything they want in a career, and it is an opportunity to create income and security for today and tomorrow. So, why do they fail? The most common reason is the owner does not have the business knowledge and experience they need to run the business. They know what they have to offer but not how to do so fast enough, efficiently enough, or as profitably as is necessary to maintain a healthy business. As the business struggles, so does the owner. Personal satisfaction is almost always tied to business success for the brave individual that risks it all to have the work life they want most.

So, what does it take? It can be challenging, but any business owner can deploy the strategic and practical aspects of small business ownership. Simply:[wcm_restrict]

  1. Know what you want from small business ownership. Be clear on what benefits you hope to gain: flexibility, control, money, feed your passion. Be clear on what role you want it to play in your life and your schedule.
  2. Take time to plan. Winging it does not work.
  3. Align the plan with your life dreams, values, and priorities.
  4. Be accountable to the plan. Be committed to the dates, deadlines, and actions.
  5. Do what you do best… always. Delegate or outsource the rest.

Additionally, there are some secrets to success that have more to do with your internal message center than knowledge, experience, or training. They are those soft and sometimes transparent skills of intuition, attitude, perspective, and acceptance. Practice these:

Accept that success takes time. It is rare for a business to be profitable in the first year. Reaching revenue, profit, business development, personal income and other goals typically takes 3-5 years. Having a safety net and back-up plan are critical. Prepare today to survive the long term.

Boundaries are critical to a balance between work and life. You are the only person that can set boundaries for the way you work and the way you live. You need boundaries for work and all other areas of life, boundaries with employees, and boundaries on personal and business money and investments.

It is not easy to relinquish control, but it is critical to know when you need help and ask for it. Be willing to ask for help and accept it – personally and professionally. Your ability to hire staff, delegate and outsource can help you reach your professional and your personal goals much quicker.

Surround yourself with the right people and resources – in work and in life. Every business owner has a need for resources and support. Select them carefully. The right team can help build your business, develop professionally, and inspire you to create more than you ever dreamed possible.

Have the right attitude. Attitude is free and powerful. Focus on creating and maintaining – optimism, mindfulness, respect for self, and respect for others. When you make the positive choice, your outcome is higher productivity, better business results, and a more joyful life.

Trust your Inner Voice. Your inner voice will keep you out of danger and help you to avoid pain. It will help you sort out the differences between work and life.

Finally, it is critical that you take advantage of your opportunities. We will call these the ‘green lights’. When you are clear on what you want the answers will often just ‘show up’. Learn to recognize them as opportunities and move in that direction. Take advantage of all those situations have to offer.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Sherry B. JordanSmall business consultant and expert Sherry B. Jordan has spent the past 15 years working to develop ways to help small business owners move from making a choice to own a small business to living a lifestyle they love while making a living. Her new book, Plan It! Do It! Love It!: Be Outrageously Successful in the Small Business Lifestyle, captures and shares an arsenal of strategic advice on how to plan and execute a successful business strategy. The advice that may be most valuable is that which she offers on how to engage the tools you are born with to get what you expect and deserve without sacrificing joy and fulfillment of a rich personal life.

Strategizing for Success: Keys for Planning Annual Sales & Marketing Goals, part 2 of 2

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The Strategy of Creating a Space for Success

A fundamental strategy for annual planning is creating a space for success. You can only have so many things. When something is occupying space, something else cannot occupy the same space. This is true both literally and in the metaphoric sense of occupying mental space or space in your business. If you no longer need something, getting rid of it can free up some space. This creates a space for you to attract something new to your business or other areas of your life.

To help you review the ‘space’ surrounding your business, here are some questions to ask yourself:[wcm_restrict]

  • What was great about the past year?
  • What are you most proud of?
  • What were you most surprised by?
  • In what ways did you grow?
  • What was your biggest success?
  • What adversity did you overcome?
  • What skills did you develop?
  • What goals did you accomplish?
  • What was your most challenging sale?
  • What were you consistent at?

Finding Your Direction

Once you’ve oriented yourself in your business space, it’s time to review your past year’s performance in order to identify some areas where you can improve. Here are some examples of questions to help you perform this evaluation:

  • Based on your annual goals where should your results be right now?
  • Did you hit your gross sales number, total units number, or total recruits for the year?
  • How was your consistency during the past year?
  • How did you do in the area of appointment setting?
  • How did you do in the area of follow-up?
  • How did you do in the area of consistency?
  • How did you do in the area of marketing?
  • How did you do in the area of social media?
  • How did you do in the area of web marketing?
  • How did you do in the area of recruiting?
  • How did you do in the area of training?
  • How did you do in the area of motivating your team?
  • How did you do in the area of making your calls?
  • How did you do in the area of time management?
  • How did you do in the area of objection handling?

Use this list of questions to develop questions specific to your own industry, business, and product and service lines. You can also ask questions about non-business areas that impact your business. For instance, how many hours of sleep did you average per night this year, and how many hours would you need to achieve optimal energy for top business performance?

Expand on the above list of questions to help you identify areas for strategic improvement. In order for you to achieve your potential in the next year, uncover what areas of your business and other parts of your life that need improvement.

Being Prepared Pays

The fact you’re reading this article gives you an advantage over most people. Think about how many people wait until December 31 to make their New Year’s resolutions. Most people handle their annual financial planning the same way. Gallup’s annual Economy and Personal Finance survey for 2013 revealed that 70 percent of Americans do not prepare a detailed personal budget.

Entrepreneurs who handle their personal finances this way are prone to carry the same habits over into their business planning. When you consider that poor financial planning is one of the top causes of small business failure, you can see why creating an annual financial plan early gives you an advantage over the competition.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Eric LofholmEric Lofholm is a Master Sales Trainer, author, business success guru, communications expert and lauded speaker who has presented his proprietary, proven sales and success systems to Titans of Industry and thousands of other professionals world-wide. He founded and serves as CEO for Eric Lofholm International, Inc. — an organization that professionally trains achievement-minded individuals and employee groups on the art and science of selling. Connect with Eric online at www.SalesChampion.com.

Strategizing for Success: Keys for Planning Annual Sales & Marketing Goals, part 1 of 2

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Each fourth quarter as the New Year approaches, it’s prudent to prepare a profitability plan for the coming year, especially with respect to your sales and marketing endeavors. Doing so can give you a notable competitive edge, particularly given the extraordinary number of professionals that don’t bother producing this strategic tool. But, whether developed before or after the start of the New Year, the importance of creating a tactical plan for sales and marketing success cannot be overstated. Here’s how to set yourself up for annual planning success.

Successful annual planning requires one key ingredient: your mindset. Indeed, the first step towards successful financial planning is setting an intent to successfully complete your plan. What doesn’t get scheduled doesn’t get done. Make a commitment now to complete an annual financial plan by midnight of December 31. If you need some help getting this done, you can sign up for my annual Sales and Marketing Plan training and you’ll have an opportunity to submit your plan to me by December 31. If for some reason you don’t end up reading this until after December 31, make a commitment to create an annual plan over the next month so that you have it ready by the start of the next quarter.

[wcm_restrict]Asking Yourself the Right Questions

Creating your plan is largely a matter of asking and answering a series of questions that help you identify your sales and marketing goals and other financial goals and then verbalize steps to achieve those goals. You should ask yourself questions about key annual sales goals such as how many leads you want to generate, how many appointments you want to set, and how many sales you want to make. After defining some annual goals, you can break these down into smaller time frames by quarter, month, and week to make it easier to define concrete steps for achieving your goals. I’d encourage you to create a Word document or get a notebook where you can ask yourself some annual planning questions.

Examples of the types of sales and marketing goals that can go into creating your annual plan include:

  • Ultimate outcomes for the year
  • Annual revenue projections (sales results)
  • Annual marketing strategy (marketing tactics)
  • Ultimate outcomes for each month
  • Monthly revenue projections
  • Monthly marketing strategy
  • Monthly projects (if any)

You can break each of these goals up into more specific areas. For instance, you can break your target sales results down into lead generation, appointment setting, and sales.
You can also break each category down by quarter and by month. You can break it down even farther by week or by day if you so choose.

Supplementary Goals in Other Areas

In order to achieve your marketing and sales goals, you may find it helpful to set goals in other areas of your business or personal life. For example, in your business, you may set a goal of hiring more staff, adopting new automation tools, or developing and releasing new product and service lines.

Achieving personal goals can also help you achieve your business goals. For instance, if you haven’t been sleeping on a regular schedule, setting a goal of getting on a more consistent sleep cycle next year may help make you more productive. Similarly, you can set goals in areas such as your personal finances, health, relationships, and spiritual development.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Eric LofholmEric Lofholm is a Master Sales Trainer, author, business success guru, communications expert and lauded speaker who has presented his proprietary, proven sales and success systems to Titans of Industry and thousands of other professionals world-wide. He founded and serves as CEO for Eric Lofholm International, Inc. — an organization that professionally trains achievement-minded individuals and employee groups on the art and science of selling. Connect with Eric online at www.SalesChampion.com.

Bob Caporale

Developing Your Strategic Proficiencies

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There is certainly no shortage of articles, texts, and resources dedicated to the subject of developing business strategies. I myself am guilty of adding to this information pile, having just released a book on this very topic. But as we all attempt to decode the magic formulas and frameworks behind best-in-class business strategies, we should also take a little time to understand the skills that are required of the people who create those strategies.

The process of developing business strategies is a creative one¬ – not unlike writing music, painting a portrait, or designing a new architectural masterpiece. Creative endeavors produce creative outputs; and the success of those outputs will be driven not only by skills, but also by some level of proficiency in those skills. Using this terminology, it is useful to think in terms of four “strategic proficiencies” that can be mastered in relation to developing successful business strategies. They are:

Analysis
Recollection
Intuition
Artistry

In and of itself, this mnemonic of ARIA may appear to be yet another catchy little arrangement of words to help sell more books! And while there may be just a shred of truth to that statement, there is actually both a rhyme and a reason for my line of thinking behind this approach.

When assessing strategic proficiencies, I like to refer back to the four main questions that have formed the very foundation of strategic theory for centuries:[wcm_restrict]

  • Where are we now?
  • Where have we been?
  • Where do we want to go?
  • How are we going to get there?

In the simplest of terms, these questions cover the present, the past, the future and the critical path to get wherever it is you want to go. However, stating these questions and actually being able to answer them are two very different things. And being able to answer them is exactly where your strategic proficiencies will come into play.

In order to address the present (“Where are we now?”), you must develop the proficiency of analysis. An analytical person is generally thought of as someone who can take large amounts of data and process it in some logical way. You can have all the knowledge in the world, but if you have no way to sort through and evaluate that knowledge, it will be about as useful as a disconnected hard drive. Analysis takes both patience and focus but, when mastered, it will provide the means to understand information in the present state and ultimately use that data to help determine your future plan.

The past (“Where have we been?”) can be most appropriately addressed by developing the proficiency of recollection. Nothing drives a successful strategy better than experience. However, the effective use of past knowledge does not only involve retaining information, it also involves selectively recalling and drawing upon whatever pieces of that information will be relevant to your overall strategic story. In this way, you will be able to utilize your experience and knowledge without being overly imitative or without restricting your future thought process by, frankly, “knowing too much.”

If the past and present are about knowing and processing information, then the future (“Where do we want to go?”) will involve using this information to predict what may or may not happen next. This will be driven by the proficiency of intuition. Often times, intuition is looked at synonymously with having a good “gut instinct,” which, in and of itself, involves being able to acquire knowledge through feeling rather than reason. To do this, the keen strategist will learn to quickly and astutely observe trends, and then use that information, practically in real-time, to help predict future responses and outcomes.

Once you understand the present, past, and future, you need to act upon whatever knowledge you’ve acquired about each of these states. Answering the question of “How are we going to get there?” is where the core of your strategy will ultimately live; and that answer can be most effectively found by utilizing the fourth and final strategic proficiency of artistry. An artist is someone who feels something so strongly that he or she absolutely has to find a way to express that feeling to others. Someone who has the passion to change the world will make a strategic expression to do just that, while someone who is just running through the paces of putting together a plan may fail to produce any significantly differentiable results. Artistry is the difference between those two extremes, and it is the final ingredient required for developing a successful strategic mindset, and an equally successful strategic plan.

ARIA helps to remind us that strategic planning is, indeed, a creative process, and that, like most creative endeavors, you must balance your knowledge of the present, past, and future with some level of passion and creativity in order to turn your plan into an actionable result that will actually make some difference in the world.

Adapted from the new book Creative Strategy Generation: Using Passion and Creativity to Compose Business Strategies That Inspire Action and Growth (McGraw-Hill, 2015), by Bob Caporale, President of Sequent Learning Networks.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember]

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About the Author

Bob CaporaleBob Caporale is the author of Creative Strategy Generation: Using Passion and Creativity to Compose Business Strategies That Inspire Action and Growth (McGraw-Hill, 2015) and the President of Sequent Learning Networks. His goal is to help business practitioners infuse more passion and creativity into their jobs. You can learn more about his work by visiting bobcaporale.com.