Move Faster in the New Year: Lose the “Business Wait”

by Bill Ringle on January 6, 2012

“It’s the New Year, so I’m going to get into the best shape of my life,” say so many as they rush to the new health club and peddle or push or pump with gusto on unfamiliar apparatus. They wake up in such pain in so many places the next morning, wondering if the mad urge that overtook them the other day has truly passed or whether they will muster the will to return to the gym.

The desire to get into shape is a good one with truly great benefits on physical, emotional, and social levels. In the short term, exercising burns calories far better than clicking a mouse or tapping a keyboard. When you’re at the gym, you connect with new people and have a chance to see friends and colleagues in a different context that deepens your relationships. However, sensible people like you and I can agree that you can no more reverse the effects of years of bad habits in a single workout than you can take seven showers on Sunday and be set for the week.

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Secret Advantage: Referral Chains Create a Stronger Business

by Bill Ringle on December 1, 2011

chain-linksAmanda sat at the conference table and had the five documents with her that members of my top end Business Owner Growth Program are asked to prepare in advance of their first 1:1 coaching session.

As we were evaluating the strategies she had used to grow her business, she shared that referrals were one of her top three ways of getting project leads. I asked her about her best projects in the last year and where they originated. Many did come from referrals. What was even more surprising to her was how many of those referrals kept coming from a few really good sources.

“Without knowing it, you’ve done a great job creating strong referral chains,” I said. The quizzical look on her face invited elaboration.

“A referral chain is created by simply asking someone you know to introduce you to someone else for a specific purpose, then repeating the process over time,” I explained. “When it happens naturally, it’s serendipity. By cultivating more of these relationships, you can skyrocket your business growth.”

Size, speed, and potential are the three biggest reasons why you want to use referral chains to grow your business.

The size. Each person you know has relationships with at least 200 other people, on average, according to social research studies that were conducted pre-social media. Because you’re interested in this topic, I think it’s fair to say that with one link on the referral chain, you have access to over 200 people directly. If each of these people give you access to their first level networks of 200 people, that’s 40,000 potential people with whom to do business. LinkedIn does a terrific job of making this network effect apparent; look on the bottom right corner of your profile page to see your second level contact number.

The speed. Warm introductions from someone who knows, likes, and trusts you bring you past the initial hurdles of skepticism and defense in a business relationship. Imagine telling me that you were going to launch a new venture and wanted a great looking web site launched fast. I know dozens of people who could do a terrific job for you. Maybe after a few more questions, I say,”OK, you’ve got to meet Erin Hyland. Work with her and the Jack Out of the Box team. They’ve done work for us and they are perfect for what you want to accomplish.” Then I tap my iPhone and send you her contact info on the spot. If you take people with whom you’ve done business or supported, such as vendors, past clients, and associations, into account, that speed in jump-starting a business relationship adds up fast.

The potential. All too often, business leaders acknowledge that a particular channel, relationship, product, or project is top priority and then fail to support it with time, attention, and resources. With businesses either on the verge of the growth stage or well past it, knowing where and when to step on the pedal is vital. For example, if a single referral chain is worth $200,000 to your business, a) it doesn’t hurt to spend time together periodically and show your appreciation, and b) it’s very much worth your while to cultivate other similar relationships. Once you really decide to grow your business and can see the way that referral chains work, you’re much more committed to developing them ever more deliberately and skillfully.

When you are building links in your referral chains, you’re creating both short term growth and long-term value in your business, just like Amanda.

Your Steps to Success

Reach out to the people you know through business and find a way to serve them. Offer information, resources, contacts, and the benefit of your experience. Accept that not everyone will be equally enthusiastic or clear on what to do next, but reward those who do respond and participate and engage with even more value, appreciation, and ways of improving their business conditions and personal lives. Embrace your role as a referral source and gladly seek to offer your best advice, contacts, and resources to colleagues and friends and any others whom you encounter.

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Enduring Company Benefits

by Bill Ringle on November 2, 2011

Have you ever taken the time to look back on what you’ve learned and how you’ve benefited from the places you’ve worked? 

Here is one example from my experience.

In 1989, When Chris Swisher hired me to lead a team that was responsible for 200 computers and to develop curriculum and consulting programs that supported 13,000 academic and administrative end users at Drexel University, I not only deepened my knowledge base, but also gained my first experiences as a manager, spoke on the local news stations as a computer expert, and began building my professional network that extended from the president’s office to incoming freshmen. As I was doing the work, I valued the problems I was able to solve for the faculty, students, administrators, and staff. At that point in time, it was a fabulous exercise in building problem solving skills and communicating solutions on a fairly large scale, with a wide variety of new challenges each day. In short, I got paid to geek out.

As I look back two decades, I realize that the technical knowledge had a half-life of about five years, but the relationships I created by being a reliable and communicative in-demand problem solver continue to be rewarding, personally and professionally. People whom I met at Drexel are people I still enjoy meeting for lunch or cycling or tennis, who have referred new business to my company, and serve as advisory board members and reviewers of my books and projects. Naturally, I’ve reciprocated in kind and served on the Alumni Board and search committees, consulted on grants, served as a reference for job seekers, and celebrated awards, retirements, and other noteworthy events.

The key take-away from this update is to look at the many dimensions of the company you keep, as colleagues, staff, partners, or associates — it’s part of the often under-appreciated, enduring treasure in your life.

Your Steps to Success

November starts the holiday season for me because I start to look forward to Thanksgiving early on. I savor the anticipation of the holiday, not just for the turkey aromas, family fun, and football games, but because it triggers me to reflect on all the things I have to be grateful for in my life and work.

Here’s how to get started with this growth principle.

  1. Reflect on highlights of the past year. What’s been a favorite project at work? Who have you gotten closer to among your family and friends? If you have children, what milestones have they crossed that make you proud, happy, or relieved?
  2. Since most people reading this are responsible for a business, a team, a project, or a division, reflect on how you’ve grown and gained in key areas. For example, what new clients did you serve? How did you improve your internal or external communications? What new systems or initiatives did you create and what did you learn as a result? This process feeds into a planning process that I do with my coaching clients and that I’ll be offering as a public workshop in Q1, so stay tuned.
  3. Share what you’ve learned to amplify the impact. You can share the highlights with your staff and ask them to do the same for a more rounded view (it may or may not make the full 360 arc) of your progress and accomplishments. One way that I’m using this process this year is by sharing at least one thing I’m grateful for each day of the month on Twitter in order to stimulate several thousand people a day to read and reflect on this theme in their own lives, as well as to raise my game in this social media channel; I’m always finding new ways to challenge myself and grow, and I encourage you to do the same! Follow @BillRingle for the #grateful tweets.

 

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Your Choices Create Results

by Bill Ringle on October 5, 2011

Meet Paula. Paula ran a successful events management company until she sold it, and now works as a solo management consultant. She explained that she had had a few tough years with the economy, but was now ready to make some big things happen and increase her earnings. Paula met a coach who said he could help her grow her business. Within a few coaching sessions, Paula had a clear idea of who she needed to reach out to, what she needed to say, and how to track her progress.

After a few weeks, Paula had more leads for project work with good clients than she had in the previous year. Marketing was working and work felt fun again. But there was a small problem: Paula wasn’t getting any new contracts. Instead of following up with a lead, Paula went to a book club meeting one morning, because she was “already committed to going.” Instead of making time for an important conference call, Paula postponed it so she wouldn’t miss her yoga class that she enjoyed so much. Following a client meeting Paula planned to return to her office, write a proposal, and have her coach review it before sending it off to the prospect. Instead, she got a call from a friend who asked her for a ride home from the airport which then expanded into a longer visit. Paula missed her window of opportunity and lost the momentum with several prospects. All of her plans to grow were being undermined by one crucial factor: other things were getting in the way of what Paula knew she needed to do. But it wasn’t really “other things” that were responsible for Paula’s plans running afoul, as you well know. It is all about the choices that Paula made.

Haven’t you ever experienced that? I’ve been there. Maybe it was making a sales call. Maybe it was writing a report or having a difficult conversation with a colleague. We all have our own specific tasks that trigger the “avoidance flurry,” as I like to call it. Avoidance flurries are brought on by a host of different factors that can be minimized over time.

The important thing to recognize here is that each of us, first person singular, is in control of the choices we make, and the choices we make determine the results we produce.

Your Steps to Success

Here’s how to get started with this growth principle.

  1. Get crystal clear on what your most important priority is for today. Once you know that getting the proposal sent is your number one priority, you can recognize what activities move you toward its completion (having it open on your computer is a good sign) and which take you away (checking Facebook for news falls into this category).
  2. Allocate more than enough time to make progress. This is really important. If you expect it will take an hour, set aside two hours to allow yourself time to finish. It’s generally counterproductive to create artificial pressure and many leaders do this poorly, anyway. Instead, reward yourself for finishing early when you do and enjoy that you’ve created some discretionary time in your day.
  3. Plan to succeed by making sure you have all the resources you need to stay focused. The better you can anticipate and prepare your environment to support you, the better you can focus on your priority without having to pop up from your seat to get more water; raise or lower the heat, air conditioning, or shades; or grab a notebook, pen, etc.

Implement these three steps and you’ll be well on your way toward success.

 

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Malcolm Gladwell on Why People Succeed

by Bill Ringle on September 27, 2011

In this excerpt, Malcolm is relaying Vic Braden’s observations about how the best tennis players in the world are unaware or have an inaccurate story in their mind about how they do what they do, such as hit a topspin forehand, and generalizes that to how many expert performers in other domains might be the last people to ask about how they accomplished a complex, difficult, or sophisticated goal.

Gladwell does a great job of finding the gaps and raising the flag when he learns that something seems off base, like the notion of asking an expert to describe what he does. In this case, he’s pulled back the curtain on behavioral modeling and revealed the idea that it requires a different skillset to teach a great thing than to do it. That’s a great distinction, but it shouldn’t be entirely surprising. Think about it for a moment and you’ll see how obvious it is in this example: The best basketball coaches (e.g. Wooden) weren’t the best players, and the best players (e.g. Jordan) wouldn’t make the best coaches. Here are three additional insights you can get from the idea of behavioral modeling, based on my own research and application in business and in sports:

  1. Go to the source and observe. Like Braden did with using high speed video cameras to capture how top players hit high speed forehands, he went to find people who were already producing the result he wanted to understand. I contend that he missed his mark, though, because the people who produced the result he wanted were the coaches of the top pros, not the pros themselves (and those coaches might have done their work with the pros many years ago).
  2. Know what your goal is and ask good questions. You get a construct when you ask, “What should I do?” (advice). You get a recipe when you ask, “What did you do first in this particular situation? What next? And the next step after that?” Experts have made these steps largely unconscious and automatic, so it takes some skilled probing to deconstruct.
  3. Accomplishment is as much about state of mind as it is technique, if not more. When people ask, “How did [successful icon] do that?” what they are often really wondering is how they can follow in their footsteps and repeat the success. And while using proven models, techniques, and systems is foundational, improving one’s outlook, expectation for succeeding, and pride in accomplishment is the real X factor.

 

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See What Elegant Collaboration Looks Like

by Bill Ringle on September 2, 2011

If you're in the Greater Philly area, check this out

For those who struggle with business collaboration – the coordinating, communicating, and compromising that is conducted in this dance performance by Green Chair Dance Company at the Philly Fringe Live Arts Festival will be a treat. You may never again think of your job in the same way after seeing the physical body puzzles that these dancers/gymnasts present.

Read all about it on their web site. The performance, called A Vegan Kid’s Dance For Adults, is September 9, 10, and 11. Let me know if you’re going via a comment below so we can connect and say hi.

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Steve Jobs Explains 2 Rules for Success

by Bill Ringle on August 9, 2011

In an on-stage interview, Steve captures the role of passion in driving a successful business. He says that you’ve got to love what you’re doing; otherwise, you couldn’t sustain the effort. “Without passion, any rational person would give up.” He reflects on the need for having fun, so that the journey is rewarding. Passion and drive are important, and when I worked at Apple, one aspect of the company did seem like a huge G&T campus for technically and artistically inclined adults. Passion really was in the air, and part of that was due to smart hiring (another aspect that Steve addresses) and part of that was smart culture design.

When you watch the video, be sure to keep in mind that there is a lot that goes on in a successful business that isn’t fun and exciting, but is really important. At Apple I saw this in the rigor of the product roadmap planning sessions and marketing launches. As I work with CEOs now, I find it in the ways that teams can implement strategies and plans at a consistently high level. These are the aspects of leading a business at any stage and size that involve structures and systems that keep the business (and the employee’s passion) moving forward in a productive direction. In other words, passion is essential, but it’s not the whole story.

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Special Offer for You from Debbie Allen to Attend P3 Epic Event

by Bill Ringle on August 1, 2011

Debbie Allen, along with her partners, Tracy Repchuk and Marie O’Rirordan, invite you to learn cutting edge techniques on Branding, Publicity, Social Media & Internet Marketing at their Power of 3 Epic Event for entrepreneurs in Las Vegas, September 2-3.

As a special gift to my friends, fans, and followers who are business owners and who want to take part in the experience, please contact me. Debbie has been generous in offering several tickets to me at no charge and I would be delighted to pass one along to you. Simply contact me and request a ticket. You’ll be responsible for your travel and lodging, but you’ll have a free ticket to this valuable event.

 

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Bill Ringle Leads Panel Discussion of Experts on Small Business Financial Management

by Bill Ringle on July 7, 2011

Last night, I led a group of amazing guest panelists through a discussion of the highs and lows of financial management for a group of entrepreneurs hand-picked by the regional Small Business Association office based in Philadelphia.

During the session, we had two entrepreneurs volunteer for “Hot Seat” evaluations, where they shared their current financials with the expert panelists and then engaged in a very enlightening discussion as the experts reviewed and questioned each entrepreneur.

In the 3-hour session, the top five topics that received the most interest and attention were: 1) Clearly understanding the need to review and understand basic financial reports on a periodic basis (monthly, if not weekly). 2) How a financial professional reviews a P/L statement and balance sheet and cash flow statement to quickly assess whether a business is healthy or not. 3) How a bank or other lending institution will preform a review to see if a business is credit-worthy. 4) How the structure of a business should be apparent in the balance sheet (outstanding shares, etc.). 5) How your P/L and balance sheet work together to lead the business compared to how the cash flow statement and budget work to manage the business.

Joining me on the panel were:

  • Carmen Adames, owner of Adames Professional Services, minority/women owned certified business
  • Jovan Goldstein, Principal, JT Goldstein, LLC, specializing in privately owned professional service businesses
  • Dad Sossaman, Sr, Vice President of Government Guaranteed Lending, Continental Bank, one of the top 100 SBA lenders nationwide

Thanks to my amazing expert panel guests as well as all the entrepreneurs who participated.

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Progress Can Be Measured By What You Stop Doing as Much as What You Start Doing

by Bill Ringle on June 28, 2011

Colin, who ran a social media marketing firm, had a template that he used for proposals. He believed that proposals needed to have a lot of “heft” to be taken seriously. After all, he was trying to differentiate himself from hundreds of other social media marketing consultants in the city who were potential competitors for the same jobs, therefore it was imperative to detail his considerable knowledge and experience in each proposal to remind the prospective client of how great it would be to work with his company. That’s what Colin thought when we started working, anyway. At that point, he was getting 1/4 to 1/3 proposals approved for ongoing project work. Each new client was worth tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the business relationship.

Colin was struggling with the time it took to customize his complicated template and he was frustrated with other aspects of the process. He thought he was doing pretty well with the success rate. We focused on this segment of the business development process and in less than a month of honing his process and challenging assumptions he was making about the process, we had his 24+ page proposal template down to a lean 5 pages and his success ratio went to 7/10 that month, all from “putting that ducky down” to make his music (i.e. value proposition) easier to hear. Review your own business for obstacles that you’ve put in your own way so you can streamline your way to a more successful business, as well.

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