Doug Kreitzberg

Archives for June 2009

Five Easy Steps to Grow Your Company

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In a recent post at techcrunch.com, Sarah Lacy mused on whether execution is more important than vision.  The vast majority of comments testified to the fact that execution (getting things done) is more important than vision (having the idea).  In fact, the business world is littered with failed companies that had great ideas and successful copies which managed to take other’s great ideas and actually get something accomplished.

At the same time, knowing what and when to execute is perhaps even more important than the execution itself.  I can do a great job getting things done, but if they aren’t the right things, then I’ve wasted my time and getting better at executing won’t matter.

When any company is challenged with growth, managers typically think that they need to overhaul their entire strategy and come up with a new vision or they just need to work harder at what they’re already doing.  In certain cases the managers might be correct, but I would argue those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Both actions are stressful, demoralizing and typically unsuccessful.  The better way is not to overthink vision or execution.  It’s to look at your business, find what’s working and do more of it.  It’s that easy and can be done if you follow these five steps:

One: Know what drives your business

If you are not growing today, you need to change what you are doing. But you can’t change what you are doing if you don’t know where you are.  That is why having clear visibility into the metrics that really drive your business is so important.  Don’t focus on the P&L — they only show lagging indicators.  Try to measure and look at the activities that generate your P&L; # of sales calls, campaign conversion rates, time to answer, etc.  Create your own business dashboard of the metrics you think are important and track them for a few months. Look to see what is really driving your business, what helps or prevents growth.

Two:  Find Out Where the Growth Is

As you begin to look at your business through your dashboard, you will begin to see where there are opportunities for growth in your business.  It might be a producer who consistently makes x number of calls, or a market segment which seems to like your products / services more than others. Don’t worry if the growth is small, think of it as finding a small speck of gold in a sifting pan.  It might be small, but it tells you where to keep looking.

Three: Expand Your Growth Target

Once you’ve identified a couple of areas in which growth already exists in your company, you need to think about how to better leverage those areas so that it becomes more of a meaningful part of the organization.  Do you expand the geography?  Do you need more producers?  Do you redevelop a training program based on the actions of one producer? Do you apply what you’re doing to other market segments?  The key is to enlarge the strike zone so that you have more opportunities to be successful.

Four: Execute on what works — but on a larger scale

So you know where the growth is and you’ve expanded your target area.  Now, it’s just a matter of executing on a larger scale.  It may require more producers, more marketing campaigns, more developers, better training programs, talent upgrades.  Develop a game plan to increase / adjust resources  which account for cashflow and/or profitability considerations (obviously, you may not be able to do everything at once; capital requirements may require your plan to be staged over time.) This is where the action takes place and this is where you might think things get hairy.  And, of course there are always pitfalls, but the best part is that you’ve done it before.  That takes the stress out and, without stress, the game slows down and things do get easy.

Five:  See What Works and Adjust

Of course, you can’t just sit back and relax while the growth curves up.  You need to continue to monitor your activity and the results to see if your actions continue to generate the growth you expected.  If you see things going in a different direction, adjust (sooner than later), and see if it works.

With a few exceptions, growth does not have to terribly difficult. It simply requires knowing your business, expanding on what already works and having the persistence it takes to do the little things that make big things happen.

Groucho Marx, CEO

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“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”  Groucho Marx.

I’ve loved the Marx Brothers since I was in seventh grade.  That was the year I switched from Catholic school to public school.  It was a year I felt I could breathe again, met great friends and the Marx Brothers’ irreverent sense of humor seemed perfect for the jibes I wanted to send St. Mary Magdalen’s way.  When my son was five or six I opened him up to “Duck Soup”, and the only time the clicker comes to rest in my hand is if I find a Marx Brothers movie or interview on TV.

The Marx Brothers were masters of poking fun at establishment figures.  The characters they played were usually grifters who found themselves lauded by members of high society or government or academia, and their comedy came not because the Brothers set themselves against the establishment, but they became the establishment in its rawest, truest sense.  And, in its rawest, truest sense, the establishment proved to be nothing more than artifice and pretense.  Strip away the medals and the black ties and these “high falutin'” people were nothing more than low time grifters, street vendors or working stiffs; in other words, they were just people.

Last week, I was talking with a client. We were talking about coming up with a new campaign that recognized their members in a unique way, that viewed them as special, that offered them benefits normally reserved for high net worth individuals.  We will look at developing strong creative and powerful messaging and that will be important. But, in the end, the creative is not the key; in fact the creative can run into the danger of just being pure artifice if we don’t recognize that the real key is having people on the phone who treat the caller as if they were a person.  People don’t want to be built up or put down.  They just want to be listened to, they want to be told up front what the deal is and they don’t want surprises.  I can tell you we will spend more time shoring up our training than creating sexy urls.

To be successful in business, you need to channel your own internal Groucho: strip away the artifice and trappings that separates you from your customer (or employees, for that matter), treat them as a person, and they will never leave you.

Of Sofas, Living Rooms and Arm Chairs

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I’m in my living room, looking at my sofa and I’m not happy. The sofa is beat — torn up and god knows what else from the animals. In addition, since I took up the last wall of the living room with another bookcase, it’s slung kitty-corner in the room, making a goal-line stand in front of one bookcase containing philosophy and history and another containing fiction and my jazz album collection.

‘This won’t work,’ I think to myself.  Then I pause and add, ‘Wait a minute, what do I need a sofa for, anyway?’

What indeed? The sofa’s main purpose is to bring people together, which is great for newlyweds and teenage groping.  I have no problem with that, but give it a few years and wring out the lovey-dovey and the sofa transforms itself into a sleeper — how many of us come home ready to spend a quite evening in front of the TV in the family room only to find a gangly 17 year old splayed across the sofa like a rorshach test, leaving you to sit in the corner on a wobbly cane chair you trash-picked five years ago? (How many of us rush home to be the first to splay themselves out on the sofa?)

And, when you have folks over, each end of the sofa is staked out first, leaving the third person to sit in the middle, arms vee’d down between their legs looking like they got seat 31E for a twenty-three hour trip home on Air Kazakhstan.

But then….not having a sofa is unAmerican.  No, actually, it’s unhuman.  Everyone has a sofa, right?  How did we get this way?  My guess is that the sofa is the product of evolution. In the beginning was the log astride the fire, then the benches that would flank each side of a dining table to be pulled out for sitting and chatting by the front room fireplace.  Next people added a back to the bench and curved arms. Then the padded seat and after that the padded back and arms and legs.  Then reclining sofas and sectionals.  Like an adaptable species, sofas learned how to survive.

But I’m thinking, Darwin be damned, the sofa is outta here! What’s wrong with a few well-placed arm chairs?  They’re comfortable, they can be moved around and grouped any which way you please, they don’t hog the room like a sofa does.  It’s perfect!

What pieces of useless furniture do you have cluttering up your mind, your view of the world? Every so often, take an inventory of your perceptions, impressions, stereotypes and categories that you use to view the world.  Take a hard look at each one and see if it adds to your sense of self and your community, or it detracts from either.  If it adds value, dust it off and put it back — if not, throw it the dumpster.  Just because you always thought one way in the past doesn’t mean you have to think that way in the future. Take a chance and lighten your load.

In the meantime, wanna buy a sofa?

Be Yourself

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Companies spend a lot of time talking about their products and how they stack up to the competition. They strategize about the need to reduce their cost or add a bell or whistle to set them apart. Now, I don’t want to discount the need to have a strong product offer. But at the end of the day,  customers won’t care as much about your products as you do.  What they care about is your ability to deliver. Do you know what you’re talking about? Do you do what you say you’ll do when we say you’ll do it? Do you care about them?

In many cases, products are not purchased because they are different from your competitors — its because you are different from your competitor.  You win when you demonstrate the right combination of expertise and credibility.  You win when you win your customers’ trust.

If you want to be successful, focus more on sharpening your skills and less on waiting for the perfect product that will “sell itself”. You succeed when people make a connection with you that they value. It’s that simple. And that hard.

Management Communication and its Disconnects

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One summer during college, I worked with my uncle’s firm building microwave towers out West.  It was one of those great jobs that pay you more in experiences than dollars that I will always remember.  During that time, my uncle noticed that I a book in my backpack.

“What are you reading?” he asked.   “‘The Archeology of Knowledge‘?  Michel Focault? Who is he?”

“He’s French,” I said. “He’s a philosopher.”

“French philosophy?” my uncle snorted.  “Good luck paying for groceries with that!”

Deep down, I couldn’t argue, but I read the French philosophers anyway, specifically the ones focused on language.  Focault, Derrida, Barthes, Saussure were tough SOBs to read, but they opened up new ways to think about words and their meanings.

One thing I learned was the difference between the signifier and the signified.  In plain terms, the signifier is the word and the signified is the object that the word represents.  For example, the word, “chair”, is a representation of something else, namely, a physical object that one may sit on.

That all seems rather obvious.  But there is one key here.  The relationship between the word and the object is a social one: people have agreed what the word, “chair”, refers to.  Without social agreement, the word becomes, in effect, meaningless.

Now, let’s assume that someone has decided that the word, ‘chair’ now refers to something else.  You come into his house and he says, “Have a seat on this nice chair,” and points you to a picture frame lying against the wall.  You hesitate and are confused.   “But it’s not a chair,” you protest.  “Yes, it is.  It is a chair.  Sit.”  If that individual has power over you, you end up having no choice.  A chair is no longer a chair.  The signifier is separated from the signified.

Now, your host asks if you would like a nice cup of tea.  You begin to sweat.  “What does he mean? Is it really what I think is a cup of tea, or is it something else?”  Stay in this funhouse long enough and you end up shaking in your picture frame/chair questioning yourself and being afraid of everything. The social contract between word and meaning has been broken and therefore the community itself begins to break down.

That’s a (hopefully) extreme example. But one of the biggest challenges organizations face is the disconnect between what managers say and what their employees experience.  And, in today’s economy of falling sales, where organizations balance the need to remain profitable, in part via layoffs, with the need to invest in growth and motivate its workforce, what is a manager to say?

The simplest answer is: the truth.  Early and often. Do not sugarcoat the situation and do not ignore the impact your actions have on your workforce.  The most important thing you can do is to remove the uncertainty of the situation.  As Stephen Gill writes, people are resilient if they know what the situation is and if there is a plan to deal with it.  Being vague or unengaged doesn’t cut it.   You need to be visible, you need to demonstrate — through actions, attitude and body language — that you are consistent with what you say.

As a manager, you can only be successful if you have the trust of your employees.  Disconnecting words from their meanings, by saying one thing and acting another or by stating that things are OK when layoffs are occurring, is a surefire way to break the social contract you have with your staff.  And, in so doing, you severely inhibit your capacity for future growth and innovation.

No picture frames for chairs.  You don’t need to be a French philosopher to get that.