MEASURE PERFORMANCE AGAINST GOALS

You must perform excellently in business in order to stay in business. And it is very helpful to be able to quickly assess progress, to see how you’re doing - to know if what’s happening is going according to plan or not - so you can make course corrections, steer clear of pot holes, swerve around obstacles, take advantage of the fast lane, and drive your business on down the road to providing customers and clients with better and better products and services, and to generating more and more personal financial rewards and experiencing all the success that goes with doing that.

An obvious benefit of measuring your performance is to learn where you are struggling. If you operate your business from a budget, against which you are performing monthly variance analyses, you can see where your results are not meeting your projections.

The numbers paint the picture. You might conclude that your financial projections were too optimistic, that you bit off more than you could chew. You might conclude that your performance - your personal business behavior - is subpar and that it needs some minor adjustment or a total overhaul. You might determine that you are overspending, perhaps using marketing tools that are not generating enough sales. You might determine that you are taking on too much debt leading to more debt service. You might determine that you have a cash flow problem, that perhaps you are not collecting money that is due.

Over both the short and long term, consistent measurements can serve to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so you can decide to modify your business behavior, put additional controls in place, or initiate other remedies to strengthen the performance of your business.

However, with all analysis there is a big caveat. When you are endeavoring to make some sensible conclusions - so you can grow your business and perform even better - by connecting the result of your monthly budget variance figures to human behavior - the doing of the tasks that produced the numerical result you see in the analysis - is there any real causal certainty. Is it possible to really know HOW you achieved a particular result, or WHY you did not?

To get some useful clarity on this question we must take a tangential turn and delve into philosophy just a bit.

Here we go. Big Fat Truth: The inside of your own mind is the only thing about which you can be sure and certain. That is where you know for sure and for certain that George Washington was the first President of the United States. You know in your mind. In fact, every bit of what you know is based on your experiences and thoughts, feelings and sense impressions. That’s it.

Whether you see it in a bank statement, or on a spread sheet, or in a stack of past due bills, the “facts” are in your mind, not in a piece of paper you hold in your hand, or in a computer document.

Some really smart people say we do not really know anything. We just somehow come to believe things. Our lives - and everything about we say and do in our behavior - is perpetuated upon finely-tuned beliefs made subtly over time. Everything we have ever known has been done before, been repeated precisely, or been changed slightly or radically, and then redone a bit differently, either by us or by other people. There is no evidence to prove that we know much of anything. There is no evidence to prove that we even know who, or what we are, because everything that we have ever learned has been made up by ourselves - based upon BELIEF.

So, back to where the old rubber meets the old road and to the reality of operating your business and calculating the consequences of your endeavors to make a buck or two - sure, measure all the stuff you feel you must measure, all the key variables smart people and well written books say to measure - but remember the truth. When it comes to making rational conclusions and forecasting what to do next based upon them, there will always be a lot of guessing going on - always, because no one can ever know anything for sure and certain. We can only believe we know HOW or WHY something happened, or did not happen, or might happen again.

By all means, please measure and analyze performance Do it because there’s no better way to “know” and no better data upon which to set future goals as you make or remake plans and move ahead in your business. Them's the facts Jack. 

POSITIVE FOCUS

Recently, in our monthly Master-Mind Alliance meetings, we have been asking our members and guests to take a few minutes to recall a positive result or experience from the past 30 days or so, something that made them smile.

We ask all participants three things about that result or experience. What was significant about it? How can you build on it to make a better future? What would be a first-step-action to make that happen? These conversations are fascinating, illuminating and educational.

Sharing the details about recent pleasant events - describing what happened and planning how to leverage these experiences to make the future better - sets a Positive Focus for the rest of our meeting day. We’ll keep doing this.

At Master-Mind Alliance meetings members plan improvements and changes all the time. Reviewing what produces positive desirable results is just another part of the experience. 

DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESS INCOME

Want more income for your business? Sure, who doesn't? Well then, why not make it happen.

Hey, you can actually do this. Others have and so can you. The trick is to correctly exercise one or more of the following options.

What DOUBLING takes is some combination of one or more of these six options. Allow me to explain a bit. READ ON...

You can INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY – This means that by becoming better at organizing and managing your time, you can spend more time on your Top Money Making Activities and, therefore, sell more of your goods, products or services. And make more money. 

You can EXPAND YOUR CAPACITY – This means you can hire people to help you, therefore multiplying your money making efforts through the contribution of other people. With more people working to make more money for the business, the business can make more money.

You can ACQUIRE, MERGE OR DIVEST – This means you can obtain another business like that one you have now and make it your own. Or you can join together with someone who has a similar business and benefit by the synergy you create. Or you can separate off a part of your business that consumes resources but produces little income. Any and all of these options can help you generate more cash money for your business.

You can REVISE YOUR OFFERINGS – This means offering for sale things possibly in addition to what you offer at present - things that are easier to sell, or that have more profit in them, or some combination of both. This also can mean dumping things that don’t sell, are hard to sell, or have little profit in them.

You can ADJUST YOUR PRICING – This means either raising your prices or lowering your prices on a select few things you offer or perhaps everything. This option is the easiest to implement and the fastest to test. 

You can MARKET AND SELL BETTER – This means making corrections or revisions to how your present your goods, products and services to your audience of best potential buyers. You probably spend time doing some of this already as part of your normal routine.

And there you have it. All the business owners it has been my privilege to know who have doubled their business income - some more than once - have utilized these options in one way or another to get richer quicker. That’s absolutely splendid. For each of them, the results were more than they expected. It has been great fun for me to have played a small part in their success. I look forward to more such opportunities, perhaps working with you.

EIGHT ESSENTIALS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

 

In order to own and operate a successful business enterprise there are eight things you simply must have, must always have, and cannot ever do without. The EIGHT KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS OWNERSHIP – what those in charge must possess are listed here.
 

1. Fire in the Belly, Passion. You believe and those who know you intimately would agree that you have passion for your business ideas and entrepreneurship. You are so firmly committed to succeeding in your endeavor that you cannot see yourself doing anything else. You know that there will be roadblocks to overcome, problems to solve, issues to wrestle with and you are ready for the challenge. You truly love what you do. For you, your business is not a job, it's a joy.
 

2. The Ability to Orchestrate Events. You can make decisions quickly, can plan, organize and implement prosperity generating business activities. You can cope with whatever comes your way. You can manage stress, both short-term and long-term, so you neither burnout nor rustout. Most of the time, you comfortably make measurable progress in reasonable time.

3. Offerings People Need or Want and can Afford. You offer goods, products and services that people - with whom you can communicate via marketing and branding, and all that goes with letting prospective buyers know who you are, what you provide and how to reach you – have a genuine need or desire to buy – and can afford to pay for.

4. Vision, plus Reasonable Expectations. You clearly know where you are taking your enterprise in the short term and in the long term. You share this vision with all who are connected to your enterprise so they can buy into your ideas and support you and what you want to do. Your expectations are sensible. They make sense to anyone who you talk with about them. You are so clear about this and can explain it so simply and concisely that a five year old child could understand where you want to go and what you expect to accomplish.

5. Strategies that Work as Intended. Your business behavior is well rehearsed, practiced and polished to perfection. Most of the time, what you attempt succeeds. Your strategies, while they will need adjustment and revision from time to time, predictable produce the outcomes you envision.

 

6. The Skills of Persuasion and Inspiration. Of all the skills it takes to operate a profitable enterprise two stand above all the others. The ability to persuade people to do what you want them to do - whether that is to buy from you, to work tirelessly for you, to refer to you, to lend you money or whatever – is finely honed. Persuading people to do your bidding is easy for you. And your ability to inspire others results in all those around you finding the inner motivation it takes to get all the things that need to be done, done right the first time, and every time, and on time, and on budget, and with as much joy for all concerned as possible. You have mastered both of these sets of complex interpersonal behaviors.

 

7. Masterful Money Making Behavior. You are crystal clear about what your top money making activities are and how to perform them masterfully. This is true as well for all individuals who are connected to the operation of your enterprise. The necessary amount of resources (including time) to put top money making behavior in just the right place are identified and scheduled and monitored so that the business truly is a money making machine. You, and all those who help you, understand that the only way your enterprise can continue is when the people involved do whatever it takes to always be bringing in new money through new and repeat and ongoing successful sales activities. 

8. Enormous Self-Control and Grit. Last on the list of EIGHT ESSENTIALS is self-control and grit. It just so happens that self-control and grit are more important than intelligence, more important than influence and more important than desire. Running a business successfully is something most people cannot do well. This is why most people chose to work for someone else rather than be self employed. Business owners know that running the show it is at times an uphill battle, a struggle, and that it can be very stressful. Therefore, an inner drive to tirelessly work through challenges, failures, setbacks and adversity to achieve set goals is an essential must, probably the biggest must of all.

All long term financially successful business enterprises stand on a solid foundation of these EIGHT ESSENTIALS.

Have All Eight - Or You’ll Settle For Less. That’s the truth.

When it comes to improving the performance of a business, we start by looking into the EIGHT ESSENTIAL MUST HAVES, for if there is something missing, if something is not quite right there, whatever that happens to be, that’s where we start making things better.

A RHYME FOR ALL OF YOU

When you think about your business - if lately - things have gone askew - and you wish you only knew what to do - so you could start anew - and stop feeling sad and blue - I want you to know that you can get a breakthrough - make a sensible redo - get unstuck from the glue - and out of the stew - because when it comes to sucky results from bad strategy - there is no tragedy - no travesty - or catastrophe - or finality. You can always start fresh - make something mesh - find a new gear - persevere - steer into the clear - make next year premier - then enjoy a celebratory beer. 

EXPECTATIONS HAVE POWER

Adapted from Scientific American, August 2013

An EXPECTATION is a future-based belief that may or may not be realistic.

Question is, do expectations factor into our outcomes? Are our results determined by our expectations?

This is something that a German psychologist, named Ulrich Weger, and an Australian psychologist, named Stephen Loughnan, wondered about, so they did an experiment with two groups of people that were asked a series of questions on a video screen.

One group was told they would be given subliminal flashes of the answers that their unconscious minds would understand right before they were asked the question. The other group was told the flashes were just an indicator that the next question was about to appear.

Nothing meaningful was in the flash for either group, nothing at all. And yet, those that expected that they were being exposed to the answers did much better on the test. Apparently expecting to know the answers made people more likely to get the answers right.

Here’s some more on this topic. 

Most of us think that our bodies respond to physical exercise in a mechanical way. This is true. So we count our calorie intake, the calories we lose on a treadmill, etc. However, merely changing our thoughts about our physical activity seems capable of changing our bodies as this next experiment demonstrates.

The background: Hotel room attendants clean on average 15 rooms per day, each room taking between 20 and 30 minutes to complete. (The physical activity involved meets the Surgeon General’s recommendation of at least 30 minutes of physical exercise per day for a healthy lifestyle.) However, most hotel room attendants believe that they do NOT get regular exercise; and a lot of them believe that they do not get any exercise at all.

The experiment: Alia Crum and Ellen Langer, of the psychology department at Harvard University, told a group of hotel room attendants that their work INDEED provided the recommended exercise for a healthy lifestyle. The treatment group was monitored for 4 weeks.

A control group of hotel room attendants, who were NOT told that their work provided the recommended exercise, was similarly monitored.

People in the treatment group lost weight; their body fat percentages, waist-to-hip ratios, and systolic blood pressures dropped. Amazing, how did that happen? People in the control group showed no such improvement. These changes occurred despite the fact that the hotel room attendants’ amount of work, amount of exercise outside of work, and diets stayed the same for both the treatment and the control group.

This all goes to show that WE OFTEN GET WHAT WE EXPECT. So why not expect the best. If mindsets can change us, maybe we can deliberately choose our mindsets to improve our abilities. Yes! Perhaps we ought to choose to adopt a mindset that improves creativity, or productivity or happiness. Yes, yes, yes!

Of course, expectations can be applied to many things and it’s amazing how many barriers we can break through just because we expect to do so!

Expect the best and make it so.

BUSINESS SUCCESS STARTS WITH BEING “LARGE AND IN CHARGE”

One of my favorite quotations comes from playwright George Bernard Shaw. “A reasonable person tries to adapt to the world as he finds it, and an unreasonable person tries to make the world adapt to his vision. Therefore, virtually all progress in the world depends upon the actions of unreasonable people.” 

Trying to make the world adapt to a vision is exactly what an entrepreneurially-minded business person must do to build a successful enterprise. Take a vision, an idea of what he wants his business to be like and to do for him, and then do all that can reasonably be done to transform that idea into a business that is so attractive that lots of people will want to buy the products and services it offers. This is what making a business work is about. And it’s never easy. The road to business success is littered with the wreckage of those who tried and failed.

If you’re thinking of starting a new venture, taking your existing enterprise into a new direction, or growing beyond what you have now, what will it take to make your idea blossom? Answer: a Rock-Solid Foundation. Construct a solid rock upon which your enterprise will stand, then build the rest of what you need to get to where you want to be, then implement all the right behaviors and you’re likely to win.

Three essential elements form a Rock-Solid Foundation. To make your enterprise flourish you need all three. The first element is Desire: a burning ambition to convert your idea into a money-making machine. Your desire must be strong enough to weather fatigue, to fend off exhaustion, to deflect the slings and arrows that people who do not believe in you will surely hurl at you. 

The second element is Willingness: a readiness to do whatever it takes, to make the necessary trade offs, and to let nothing stand in your way.

The third element is Accountability: an innate need for completeness and answerability. Accountability is the disposition to be true to yourself, to keep your word, and to live a no excuses life style. 

If Desire is clear, if Willingness is wholehearted, and if Accountability is strong, your foundation, like a three-legged stool, will stand. Then you’ll be happy, perhaps deliriously so.

In the Master-Mind Alliance, we have a name for the three essential elements that form the foundation upon which to erect a viable enterprise. We call it “Intention.” Intention is just the right blend of Desire, Willingness, and Accountability. Just enough to form a Rock-Solid Foundation. Get Intention right and you can proceed to the next level of structure: Goals, Game Plans, Strategy, and Action. Get all that right and you’re on your way to the next level: Productivity, Profits, and Predictability. Get to this level and you’re almost home, almost done with the structure you need to get to the top. What’s at the top? Why success, happiness, and lasting contentment of course, good stuff indeed, absolutely splendid in fact.

Twenty-five million tax returns are filed by small business entities every year. That’s a lot of business owners struggling to make the world adapt to their vision. Many of them are doing just fine. You can be too. By all means, go out there and pursue worthwhile enterprise. “Be Large and In Charge.” Put together your Desire, Willingness, and Accountability to make your big dreams come true. And as G. B. Shaw instructs, try to be at least a little unreasonable today and everyday.