Twice weekly, I head to the gym to challenge myself with Octavio Cifuentes, a South Florida trainer for world class athletes, who graciously agreed to work with me. He has a process and method, often not readily apparent, building my strength to be both durable and explosive.
Durable and explosive… that sounds like a great business attribute. We’ll discuss that in a moment.
In my third session, after dragging a 250lb sled up and down the gym floor, I caught my breath long enough to ask – “Octavio, why all this sled dragging?” He paused, looked up from his energy drink and said. “I know you can’t see it now, we’re building your core. A strong core is essential to overall health, strength and agility. Without building a strong core first, building anything else would only lead to injury.” Then, he said. “Rest time is over, twenty push-ups please.”
17, 18 , 19… and 20. Breathless once again, I looked down at my still extant gut. Octavio was watching. “Also, I want you to remember this hard work when you decide what to feed your core.”
Your business has a core. Is it durable and explosive, or flabby and indulgent?
Do you feed it healthy fuel, and exercise it? Or do you binge on junk food and work super hard in spurts to try to create the appearance of health? Does a business core workout leave you breathless and panting to recover? Is your business injured because you ignored the core? Do you know where your core is?
We’ve found that there are three actions key to a strong core, and resulting strong business results.
Action #1: Define Your Core
In this action, it is important to describe your basic business activities and their tie to profitability. Look for the twenty percent of the actions that contribute eighty percent of the profitability. Know how you measure these key activities. Are your mission, vision and values consistent with these activities? Which skills and processes are essential to creating these services and products for your customers?
Please also note that just as your personal core includes the gut, your business core will also include the ability to go with “gut” calls, pivoting and aligning quickly. Cores can change too. Make sure you’re revisiting your business core and appropriately changing or expanding it.
Collecting cash by managing accounts receivable is an example of a core skill and process. Without cashflow, companies will suffer serious injury possibly leading to death.
Action #2: Feed and Exercise Your Core
Time to get real here. How much focus do you put on your business core? Building your business can feel a lot like dragging that 250lb sled – a painful slog. Are you feeding it with nutritious and clean burning energy in the form of the right leadership, skills training, process and employee development? Do you have a continuous feedback loop with your customers? Are the basic functions of your company people or process dependent?
When you look at your company, do you see a bunch of heroes? Do you observe shouting, running, extreme last-minute adrenaline-fueled efforts? While this is interesting in a Marvel Comics sort of way, it shows me that more feeding and exercising of the business core is needed. In a company with a well fed and exercised core, it often looks like not much is going on.
Action #3: Notice the results. Be patient, they’re often just under the surface.
Companies with a strong core can be a bit stealthy with Action #3. Competitors may see a gut, when the real strength and power lie just below the surface, and at first you might only see a gut too. Just know that muscles are being exercised, teams are forming, skills are being built, profitable business results are supporting company financial health and agility. And when the time is right, the time that you decide, these results will show up in the market with explosive strength and durability.
Tesla is a terrific example of that latent core, ready to burst forth. For years, the company was a custom manufacturer of funky electric roadsters. Then over a few years, stepped into the light as the world’s leading maker of electric cars.
I’m reminded of the words of coach Gabriella Goddard,
“Connect with your core and you’ll find strength. Act from your core and you’ll move mountains.”
What’s your core? How to you measure it? Do your customers and competitors know it, or is it an industry secret?
Do you have an expert coach like Octavio supporting you on the path to building it? Let’s start a dialog.
“Email is dead”. That’s what I hear from the plethora of marketing/seo companies who show up in email accounts that I seldom use. Instead of attempting to build a relationship with me, they’re looking for a marketing spend “booty call”.
I have passed on the booty calls, but I was buying the message that email is dead. My email marketing had been, in a word, irrelevant. Impersonal, infrequent communication about topics that weren’t interesting.
Until…a few days ago when my view on email started to shift in a more positive direction. Why? I attended a course on effective email marketing and communication – LeeAnn Webster’s Lead Machine Weekend.
What I began to see was that email isn’t dead at all. It’s actually a timeless skill that has been relegated to the back row of communication methods, pushed out by emojis and omnipresent social media. As a result, our ability to write an email with heart and clarity has declined, especially over the last ten years. That’s sad.
So now when it comes to email, I more closely resemble a Mark Twain quote: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
I’ve begun to revamp my email marketing communication using the following best practices. According to LeeAnn at Lead Machine, an effective marketing email has five components:
Engaging content– interesting, relevant to the reader and likely to elicit a response
Authentic voice– is written like the business or author would talk
Regularity– delivered on a routine basis – not too frequently or infrequently
Delivered with seamless technology– like a good friend, just shows up without any hassle
Contains valuable information (lead magnet)– this is free information that supports the reader.
Let’s compare these five best practices to a recent email that landed in my personal inbox on March 14, 2020.
It was a “Dear Family” email from a restaurant 200 miles from my home where I had cancelled a dinner reservation sometime in 2017. Since I apparently was “family”, they went on to tell me about their approach to cleaning their restaurant and that they were “closely monitoring the situation.”
Engaging content– “we’re cleaning our restaurant”
Authentic voice – if this is how they talk to their family, I imagine there are some strained relationships
Regularity – once since 2017
Delivered with seamless technology– like a narcissist friend showing up
Contains valuable information – none
The “Dear Family” email is a total miss on all five points. My response to this less than heartfelt communication was “unsubscribe”.
Since learning these best practices, I’ve been critiquing marketing emails – including ones that I have generated in the past. This disappointing result is not unusual. Most are a total miss.
Ok, now for the timeless part of email. Writing a great email precisely tracks the creation process of something that is quite uncommon these days – the letter. Illustrating this point, let’s review a typical letter that I received from my Grandparents, Honey and Poppa, circa 1982.
Engaging content– gave me a glimpse into their life in that moment and that they wish I were there too
Authentic voice– 100% authenticity, 100% of the time, they didn’t know anything different. Being a social influencer meant doing the right thing in the neighborhood
Regularity– every holiday, birthday and once a month in between
Delivered with seamless technology – just put a stamp on it, drop it in the mailbox, and it would arrive like clockwork two days later
Contains valuable information – telling me about their plans for our next celebration, which were always great
Kudos to LeeAnn Webster for using timeless concepts to bring email into a modern, relevant discussion.
How does your email marketing stack up against these best practices? Do you have heartfelt and relevant emails to share? Have you written a letter recently?
On a sweltering April day in 2004, near the intersection of West Commercial Blvd and 441 in Fort Lauderdale FL, I interviewed with the founders of ABB Optical Group. We sat in an empty, dimly lit, Thai restaurant while Angel Alvarez, CEO sketched the strategy and planned trajectory of the company on the back of a napkin, next to a circular iced tea stain.
Angel described the current status of this small contact lens distributor – $80M in sales and planning to grow exponentially! Then, in between bites of food, he started to share some of his secret sauce for growth.
“At ABB, we not only seek to take care of our direct customers – the Eyecare Practitioners, we support them to take care of their Patients too.” He said.
“When we provide the contact lens service and tools that our customers need, we help them to maintain and grow the number of patients they serve.” Angel added.
“So knowing your customer’s customer is an essential part of your growth and the Eyecare Practitioners’ growth.” I summarized.
“Roger that.” Was his reply as he wiped Pad Thai off of his white shirt.
Within a few weeks, I joined ABB. In 2007, we greatly expanded our ability to ship contact lens orders directly to patient homes or offices. Our Eyecare Practitioner (ECP) customers were getting pressure from on-line contact lens sellers. So, we created a direct shipping service so that ECPs could provide the same convenient delivery service to their patients, eliminating the need to order online. This is an example of taking care of the customers’ customer.
By 2009, I was promoted to Chief Operating Officer, growing the team and business infrastructure supporting ABB efforts. In the time period from 2004 to 2016, our sales rocketed forward by 14x and profits by over 30x. More importantly, ABB grew to serve over 25,000 Eye Care Practitioners in the US, and shipped directly to over three million patients per year on behalf of those doctors.
Today, knowing your customer’s customer has never been more important. I’ve heard many discussions during this Coronavirus time starting with “How are your customers doing?”.
While that’s a good question, it does not drive deep enough. A better question would be “How are your customers’ customers doing?” When you and I know how our customers’ customers are doing, we can anticipate growth or decline over a longer period. That longer view will support you and I to create better plans for our own businesses.
For instance, one of my clients is an online optical company. Like a lot of e-commerce companies, their sales have increased considerably in the last two months.
Will this growth continue, and create opportunities for my company to support their growth? I don’t know just looking at their recent results. I won’t know meaningful information until I look to the next customer, those consumers purchasing the products online. Diving deeper, I ask:
How is the product sales mix changing?
What’s driving this change in consumer purchasing, and will it continue?
How might this trend continue for my client once the lockdown eases a bit?
Does my client have business constraints such as availability of inventory to consider?
What investments are necessary now to ensure success a few months from now?
When these questions are answered, we begin to have information that supports us to shape a plan for the remainder of 2020 and into 2021. Amazing how a discussion over Thai food sixteen years ago resulted in a business concept that helps me today with a virus pandemic. Thanks for the insight, Mr. Alvarez.
How are your customers’ customers doing during this pandemic?
Please share with me what you’re finding. I look forward to your comments.
Recently, I met with an experienced CEO, Ray* who is a former client. He’s had a great record of business growth and value creation at his company, with a string of twenty consecutive years of profit increases. That string will likely end in 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic.
While talking about the changes he expected to make at his company, I asked him “How ready do you think your organization is for this change?”
“Well, they need to be ready, because it’s going to happen one way or the other!” was his sharp response.
My body twitched a bit with anxiety that was familiar, and my stomach started churning. I’ve been a CEO, so I recognize this comment as something that I’ve also said. To put it bluntly, ego was talking when I said it, thinking that I could speak change into existence, due to my leadership position, instead of looking for evidence of my organization’s real ability to create change. Thankfully this time, after hearing this from Ray, I paused, took a deep breath, and then he and I got into a long discussion on best practices leading change.
According to Nina Segura, CEO of Metaspire Consulting and Change Expert, over 80% of business changes fail. That’s a dismal result, and a stat that many leaders fail to consider when creating plans for change. So how do the 20% who are successful do it? They leave their ego aside, put away the bluster, and take a measured, thoughtful approach to change.
They use three steps to lead change in their company:
Get a frank assessment of the company’s current ability to make a change
Create a plan for the change
Focus on what’s in it for me (WIIFM) for employees and customers
Each of these steps have a number of attributes to consider. I will highlight a few.
A frank assessment is created by talking by talking with employees across a wide area of responsibility. The important thing to remember here is that you must seek feedback beyond those who report directly to you. Enlist allies to get this feedback, especially those whose natural way of thinking is contrary to yours. It’s also a good idea to tap informal leaders in your company, those who have influence among their peers, but perhaps don’t have the title. This step takes time, consider leverage experts in this area to accelerate efforts.
The first element of a plan for change is a vision of the company after the change, illustrating the impact of the result. Other essential elements include a structured approach on how leaders will communicate and support the change, resources required and for how long, and whether outside expertise is needed. This plan is initially created with the best information we have at the moment, then iterated as new information becomes available. Our initial plan never survives contact with the market. Expect it to pivot and evolve.
The focus on WIIFM is important when things do go wrong, or the path is harder than imagined. Employees need to know why they’re change their routine, and are being asked to learn new things. Openness and directness are key when communicating in this phase. Employees have very well-developed BS detectors, and will often feel unexpressed doubts that you may have. Customers are a little less connected to you but also need to also understand why, and how long should they expect to see these changes?
In our current business climate, we are required to make changes. How are your changes progressing?
Happy to support you as you consider a new change for your team or organization. Please comment here, call, text or email.
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