ROCKS, YOUR FOUNDATIONAL STRUCTURES

Every business stands on its structures: a foundational, complex mixture of underpinnings that create the fundamental configuration of the business itself. In the Master-Mind Alliance World we call these structures “ROCKS.” There are seven ROCKS: Offerings, People, Attitudes, Marketing, Delivery, Profits and Systems. For any business to flourish, to continue to exist, and certainly to reach DONE Business status, all the ROCKS must be functioning splendidly.

Offerings: you must offer things for sale that people want and are willing to pay for and can afford.

People: you must have the right people on the bus, people who can do what must be done with minimal direct supervision.

Attitudes: all the people associated with your enterprise, including yourself, must project a positive mental attitude, one of top notch service.

Marketing: if this does not work splendidly, all the rest of you have going on will not matter.

Delivery: the goods, products and/or services you sell must be provided in a way that knocks the socks off the buyer so they will return for more and refer their friends.

Profits: the money that comes in and goes out must add up to your favor.

Systems: all regular and repeating operations of your enterprise must be run by well tested systems, not by quirky personalities, not even your own. Systems rule.

Figuring out how to take all the logical and reasonable steps to get your ROCKS in order and functioning together as a highly productive unit, a lean mean machine, this is grist for the mill at every Master-Mind Alliance meeting, for it is part and parcel of creating a DONE Business.

A DONE Business is the grand goal, the top level, the ultimate accomplishment, for once achieved and maintained, business owner nirvana occurs. And that is ABSOLUTELY SPLENDID.

MAKE IT SO PEOPLE RESPOND TO YOUR VOICE MAILS

How do you get people call you back when you leave them a voice mail message? You want to talk to them, offer them something, perhaps sell them something, maybe make some money. But people resist, often vehemently. They often just don’t call you back. And of course you have no idea why. Did they not get your message? Are they out of town? What?

So what are you to do? How can you get people to call you back?

The answer is simple – once you understand the request and persuasion principle.

Imagine you own a mortgage company specializing in commercial lending. You work with individual investors who want to own commercial income generating properties. You’ve been in business for more than 20 years. You have phone numbers, cell phone numbers and email addresses. Your information is up to date and accurate because you keep it so.

Now you decide that you will go after some new deals. You will do that by contacting previous client investors in your database. You want this to work for you right out of the box. You’ve already prepared your best offers, rates, terms, the whole ball of wax. All that’s left to do is to make appointments with interested parties and outline the opportunity and close some loans.

So you start calling and most of the time you wind up leaving a message. The voicemail message you leave is simple. “Hi Jack. This is Herb with ACE Loans. Please call me back at 321-8778. Thanks.”

But after a few days of this, not very many people are returning your call. In fact, you’ve left two dozen of these this week and no one has called you back. This is frustrating.

Obviously this approach is not working and you need a better tactic.

I suggest you send an email first. Your email should present the bare bones of an offer and inform the person that you will call them to talk about it.

Here’s the email you send.

“Hi Jack,

Suppose you could borrow $400,000 at 3.4% for commercial real estate? Would you be interested? I’ll call you this week because I want us to talk about this opportunity.”

Jack now knows what you’re offering. In your email you’ve given him the chance to read, and if he wants, to re-read the reason for your communication. You’ve given him a reason to talk to you. When you call Jack, if you have to leave a voicemail message, the likelihood that he’ll call back goes way up, because he knows what you wish to discuss. Wow, $400,000 at 3.4%. You’ve made talking with you sound potentially interesting to him.

The formula:

Send short email with brief offer.

State that you will call soon.

State that you want to talk about possibilities.

Make the phone call – to the person’s cell phone number – that’s more personal.

If necessary, leave a message saying when you will be available.

That’s how you get people to respond to your voice messages.

TIME MANAGEMENT – 5 POINTS

Last month my Chalk Talk was about Time Management – the 5 Points. Winning with time is a must or we go bust. So what did I talk about exactly?

There are 5 keys to getting right with time, so you can beat the clock instead of having the clock beat you. To keep your business growing obviously your money making activities must be scheduled during peak money making hours and they must be started and successfully completed. And all conditions that contribute to that must be present and working flawlessly.

The 5 Points are: Block Out a Schedule, Work Your Priorities, Deflect the Urgent, Do the Hard Stuff First, and Schedule Your Distractions.

I think the first one in the most important, that’s why it’s first.

Block Out a Schedule says there are four kinds of time periods we can use: Show Time Periods, which are for our Top Money Making Activities. Prep Time Periods, which are for setting up Show Time Periods. Detail Time Periods, which are for finishing up. And Free Time Periods, which are for resting and rejuvenating.

Prep Time Periods are the most important. When our planning about how to use our Show and Detail Time Periods goes well, everything else has a far better chance of going well too.

And the critical thing about making these four kinds of time work successfully is that they are scheduled into our days and weeks and held dear. We must do that or we lose.

As usual, a link to a You Tube video of my Chalk Talk, was provided to all members for their review. 

THE POWER TACTICS OF INSPIRATION

People are people. To be happy and successful, they seek and need inspiration. As a business owner you want your people to do their best for you, to go all out, to go the extra mile. So give them sufficient genuine inspiration and they will.

Years ago a 45 year old man who’d never been in charge of anything before was given the responsibility to revive an organization of some 60 people who had not had a good day at work in over a decade. Everyone just knew the man would fail as many before him had tired and they’d all failed miserably. But this guy had a new approach, what I’ve chosen to call the Power Tactics of Inspiration.

The man definitely did not fail. The organization he directed became unbelievably successful, almost immediately. And the man who made the miraculous happen is and will be forever legendary in his field.

By properly talking to people you can get them to work tirelessly on your behalf, to go the extra mile every day.

By properly training people you can get them to act successfully on all the things what matters to you.

The proper talking is actually questioning in a particular way, in an inspiring way.

One inspiring questions is “What’s next for you, your top priority at home and here at work?” Yup, when you inspire people you ask about them, their goals, what they want.

Vince Lombardi became Head Coach of the Green Bay Packers football team in 1958. By using three hugely effective, inspiration generating Power Tactics, Lombardi turned a bunch of losers into a fabulously successful championship team. He did!

You can learn to do what Lombardi did.

Then by using the same Power Tactics Lombardi developed, you can push into productivity situations that confront you and make significantly improvements happen for your team and for yourself too. You can win bigger and bigger and more often. You can!

The Power Tactics of Inspiration will be the subject of our CHALK TALK in the March 2013 meeting of the Master-Mind Alliance. 

MULTI-GENERATIONAL FAMILY BUSINESSES

There are many successful multi-generational family businesses operating in Humboldt County, California. Some go back five generations, to the spring of 1850 when droves of folks, mostly men, began arriving in Humboldt Bay from all across the country and Europe. The newcomers came seeking gold in the nearby rivers. Most found nothing of course and quickly shifted their focus to the exploitation of more readily available resources, namely timber, salmon and raw land. From the chaos of that transition sprang new business opportunities, some which continue to prosper today. The newcomers saw needs to fill and problems to solve. Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

The family owned and operated businesses in our region, the stewardship of which has been handed down from one generation to the next, have survived all sorts of tumultuous times and events including earthquakes, floods, fires, recessions and severe depressions.

I interviewed the owners of nine local family businesses. I asked about the following issues: How do familial relationships affect the success or the failure of your business. What issues are special and peculiar to businesses run by family members? How smoothly did the current generation of management take the reins of power from the previous? What are some big problems that have confronting your enterprise in the past and how were they overcome? Is your management style markedly different from the previous operators, and if so, how? To ensure long term survival, what changes are under development? What key lessons did you learn from the previous generation? What were you not taught, but wish you had been? And what about the succession plan, bringing on the next generation, how’s that going?

I also asked about the Great Recession, you know that bad stretch that began in late 2007 or so and continues to this day. I asked questions like the following: What strategies are you using to cope with the recession? Have you had to redirect your marketing, and if so, how? Have you taken steps to get closer to your existing customers? Have you let people go, delayed new hiring? Have you lowered your expectations? What does the next year or so look like? And one last question, what’s your secret of success?

I’m happy to report that the operators of the family businesses I spoke to in Humboldt County are doing great. They are thriving, even in the recession. Much of this is because of the strength of the reservoir of family business experience.

Here’s the unique thing. There is a clear priceless family business advantage. Practically all the input the current generation might need to weather any sort of storm or to expand and grow more and more prosperous comes from the knowledge of previous generations in the family. Resting amid all that history is a vast repository of experience, wisdom, strong financial resources, plus a genuine willingness to pitch in and solve problems and of course, a compelling intention to keep the business moving forward and ensure a smooth transition to the next generation.

Growing up the sons and daughters had a unique business experience. The activities of the family enterprise were to topic of conversation at the dinner table for years. Many of the young had the opportunity to intern in the business during the summer months and after school during their teenage years, always learning at the feet of their parents. This stuff rubs off.

My father was a psychiatrist. I’m a psychologist. The business of mental health was the topic of discussion at our dinner table and I worked in my father’s office after school and during the summers doing laboratory work for him. It was a fun place for a nimble and impressionable mind to be. I’m sure my interest in the mental health of individuals and businesses was hugely influenced by my personal family business experience.

It’s true, the former generations of family business operators have seen just about everything there is to see and have had to come up with responses to all sort of crises and serious problems. Their bank of relevant experience is vast. They built their family business and know how it works. When the new generation faces a prickly problem the elders are more than willing to step in and share experiences and resources, even financial resources. They are genetically predispositioned and incentivized to do so because they are family. Input to the current generation in charge flow from the parents and grandparents and other relatives like a wide open faucet.

Let’s face this fact. It’s much easier to ask a family member, who understands and cares, for a loan when you've got a cash flow problem than it is to go to the bank. And the bank might say no. The relatives want what they built and managed to continue to flourish. They’re not going to hold back. So should the business need an infusion of capital they are likely to pitch with loans.

Now about the Great Recession: Members of the previous generation have weathered recessions before and their input has steered the current generation toward the development and implementation of successful recession coping strategies. These include the obvious notions: Get real close to current customers and clients. Learn their names. Get involved in community activities to be clearly visible. Postpone big purchases. Tighten up on inventory. Hold back on hiring. Cut costs to the bone. Reinvent and experiment with innovative marketing and sales and advertising modalities. Be hands on everywhere. Utilize free media such as Facebook. Be a cheerleader. Waste no time or effort. Manage stress by solving the problems that can be solved. Refocus and clarify the mission. And since there are family members in the business, sometimes several of them, resolve any personal messes in those key relationships. Keep those Thanksgiving dinners about the turkey, not about the business issues. Those can wait until Monday.

The business world everywhere is dominated by family businesses. One huge advantage is that they focus on long-term sustainability, community support and survival. Answering the question of how they survive intact and how families can maintain family unity over hundreds of years is essential. The family businesses that don’t survive the transfer of management from one generation to the next often point to unresolvable relationship conflicts as a big failure factor. I did not see any of that in my interviews. The folks I spoke with have figured it out. They do family business right.

Every one of the family owned business operators I spoke with loves being in their family business. They try to treat their employees like family too. They wouldn't have it any other way.

Humboldt County as a business community and as a society can feel secure in the fact that many family businesses play a major role in our economy and are here to stay. As we go forward, new history will tell us how the next five generations turn out. That will be for another writer to contemplate.

MORE, LESS, STOP, START, BETTER

HOW DO THE ALREADY GOOD GET BETTER? What’s the process for making more money and finding more happiness in your work time activities?

Big True Fact: To get better results from your business you will need to change some things. You may need to do MORE of some things, or LESS of some things, or START doing some things you’re not now doing, or STOP doing some things you are doing that aren’t working, and/or just do some things BETTER. MLSSB is the combination that makes more success happen. And what to change, well, it can be all sorts and kinds of things that need to change, not just a single one or two. But change you must if you are to be happier with your results, especially your money making results. 

You improve the performance of your business by changing your behavior and the behavior of those who work with you. It’s all about what you say and what you do… that’s behavior. 

We talk about making changes in ROUTINES or behavior at every one of our monthly group meetings. One of the goals of Master-Mind Alliance is that members make measurable progress in reasonable time. This means they change something with an expectation that the change will result in a noticeable improvement in bottom line results promptly. Then they see what happens. Did doing MLSSB produce the desired outcome? If not, then they re-apply the MLSSB paradigm and change something else. 

We know how to make the operation of any viable small business more successful. You just have to do enough of the things that are known to work. Those things are not a secret. We talk about them and share experiences using them at each and every Master-Mind Alliance meeting.

START RIGHT & WIN 

Last month my Chalk Talk was about how to start off the New Year, or the new month, or the new day in a way that is likely to produce winning results at work. 

We began off with 13 Assessment Questions looking at what’s working and what’s not. Then moved right into a discussion of Top Money Making Activities, the things people say and do that bring in the money. Essential to the application of your TMMA is setting up conditions that will make it so they work. This is about time management, allocating resources and yup, you guessed it, GOALS and planning and starting and following through with plenty of good old fashion persistent and consistent effort. 

Running a profitable small business is not easy. If it were more people would do it. It’s hard work. It takes time and patience and of course your strategies, especially your Top Money Making Activities, have to work most of the time. 

You get better at wielding your TMMA through Deliberate Practice, breaking down the complex entire activity into small pieces and practicing the pieces to perfection or to as close to perfection as you can get. Then you do a whole lot of what works and make the money flow into your pocket. 

As usual, a PDF of my Chalk Talk, plus a link to a You Tube video of my Chalk Talk, was provided to all members for their review.