School is in full swing - are you upgrading your knowledge as a leader? Always a good time of year to reflect on how we can improve our own skills and talents as business owners. And one of the best ways to start is by taking oneself out of the business to reflect on areas for improvement and to get new perspectives on how to become better leaders.

We recently hosted a speaking event with Michael Gerber - author of the tremendously successful EMyth series. Mr. Gerber shared tremendous insights with a group of almost 300 business leaders, including his mantra that business owners should work ON their businesses - as though that were the product they are creating and developing, rather than working in the business and having the company dictate your job to you. Every business can benefit by systemitizing the work that is done, otherwise the company is simply at the whim of the employees and is highly talent dependent (and ultimately worth less to potential investors, buyers, customers and partners). Allowing yourself the time to step back and reevaluate what you have now and what you want is one of the best things you can do for yourself, your business and your employees. Think about the passion you had when you started the business, take a step back. What do you LOVE about what you are doing? If you could invent a new company - what would that be? Take a day, a few days or a week and really reflect on where you are and where you want to go next. You’ll be glad you did - and so will your employees, your customers and your suppliers!

We value your comments - please use tools below and let us know your thoughts. What are you doing to improve your company and your leadership skills?

Hello & welcome – so glad you could join us! AchieveNextLevel is dedicated to helping small and mid-sized businesses develop their business. Our belief is that the sum of the parts is greater than each individual separately. And it is in this spirit that we want to share.

The website has been designed and developed by Cinch Creative Media using Joomla!, Open Source code, and that’s the philosophy and approach that we want to follow with business knowledge. Please browse the site and let us know your thoughts. We welcome recommendations for making the site easier to use and navigate, as well as ideas for new content and features. Our topic this week is Innovation – and how to instill it in a company. It’s hard as a business owner to purposely risk resources, but without doing this Innovation can’t take place (you know the saying – Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results). One of the best ways to manage the process is to allow and encourage your staff (and yourself) creative time –whether it be formal brainstorming sessions or informal discussions over pizza and beer. The important thing is to show your support in allowing the time and to encourage open discussions, questioning everything and allowing your teams to take calculated risks. To instill smart risk-taking you can use a simple risk-impact tool – on a scale of 1 (low negative impact to business) to 5 (high negative impact) – where does that risk lie? If higher, you as the executive, should be involved in monitoring progress, especially if the likelihood of failure is high. And remember failure in itself isn’t a bad thing – in fact, you should embrace failure – yours and your competitors, because lessons learned from failures are some of the greatest learning resources business owners have!

Bring out the Fan Factor in your Customers!

What’s the difference between a satisfied customer and a fan?
Customer retention and satisfaction are important to all companies because it costs so much more to acquire customers than retain them. While satisfied customers are a good start, loyal “fans” are much more likely to recommend your company, pay premiums, provide constructive feedback on new programs, products and services, and rebuff your competitors’ approaches. Establishing a Customer Loyalty program that all employees work toward is critical in making customers fans. The following guidelines will provide you short term and longer term steps to creating such a program.

Know your customers Keep accurate records of your customers and view their data on a regular basis. Knowing who your best customers are and why will help you drive delivering that same level of service for all of your customers.

Consistently deliver excellence Your customers should be able to rely on consistently high levels of quality, on time delivery and excellent service. Over delivering on commitments should be the only inconsistency your customers experience.

Don’t reward bad behavior Treating poor customers as well as your best customers not only reinforces the poor behavior, but also reduces your profits. Save those critical time deliveries for those customers who pay consistently on time and are easiest to service, and consider charging premiums to those customers that are a drain to your organization.
Say “thank you” and “we’re sorry” When you acquire a new customer, thank them formally for their business. This can be as simple as a thank you note welcoming them to your business. For your largest customers, consider establishing an exclusive, top customer recognition event. And if your customer has had a bad experience due to your company’s underperformance, acknowledge and address how you will avoid this in the future.

Establish a Formal Customer Resolution Process Ensure you have a formal resolutions process with specific roles and accountabilities for if and when your customers have an issue. Don’t allow a customer to get caught in the pass-the-customer-buck game.

Establish Measurements and Goals Develop satisfaction surveys and benchmark results against comparable companies. Keep things simple (one page surveys are best) and make sure you follow up on survey items – using the results to continually improve the customers’ perception of your company. Surveys should be of two types – transactional (based on specific interactions) and periodic (to track overall loyalty). Many specialty companies can you with survey and benchmarking services for your industry, if you don’t have the capability to do this in house.

Communicate & continually improve Once you’ve got the information on current customer satisfaction in your company, establish goals for overall satisfaction, loyalty and retention and share these with all of your employees. Consider making satisfaction an employee recognition component, not only at individual transaction level, but also at company wide goals levels.

Ask for help Customers that are fans want to promote you; they’ve made an investment in you and are proud of that investment. Publish their testimonials as a part of your marketing materials and develop a formal reference program that pre-screens and qualifies matching prospects with these customers. Use these same customers for focus groups on future initiatives your company is planning. Customers love to take part in strategy for developing solutions to their needs.

Do your customers know how your company is growing? Are all of your customers aware of creative solutions your company has put in place? Are they aware of awards and acknowledgements your company has received? Pride and confidence in knowing they’ve selected a continually innovative company is a key element in retaining customer loyalty.

Know your customers – their wants, their needs and their perceptions. Identify what your “fan” customers love about your service, products and solutions, and promote and implement those experiences throughout your company. You’ll be well on your way to growing your profits while expanding your customer base.

Businesses spend enormous time and effort developing their marketing image to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and attract customers. They work hard trying to decide what is unique about their product or service and then focus on communicating their message to their potential customers.

Conversely, they spend almost no time or effort perfecting a marketing image directed at attracting potential employees. The same marketing materials developed to attract customers are used to try to attract employees, but the corporate and marketing persona that companies stress in trying to solicit customers are seldom the same as the ones they should stress in attracting employees. Yet the same principals in supply and demand apply; in a limited labor pool with the best talent, you, the employer must pay special attention to communicating your Unique Selling Proposition as an employer through creating and sharing a compelling message to prospective staff.

Attracting enough qualified applicants is the first and most important element in recruiting and to do that you must write a compelling advertisement. You may draw better in your responses if your advertisement gives salary and benefit information, but assuming everyone is paying competitive rates and these wages are fair for the work done, money is unlikely to be the factor in getting the best people to respond to your advertisement.

To really stand out you need to identify the reasons why an employee would choose to work for you rather than any other company. The best place to start is to ask the people who work for you why they accepted the job in the first place, what they like about your company and why they choose to stay. This in conjunction with a statement on why you’re passionate about your vision will help launch you to the top of the candidate’s list of where they want to work. And in the end that’s not only good for you, it’s good for them, your customers and the market!

You’ve heard the cliche: “A picture isworth a thousand words.” Have you ever felt like you’re working hard -lots of actions, lots of doing - but not really moving forward? Maybeyou’re overcommitted. Perhaps you’re unsure of where focus should be.Fires need to be put out and the customer is always number one. Being asmall business leader means you have to be especially smart about howand where you focus resources. You have limited time, money and peopleand juggling all three requires laser focus and judgment. One techniquethat can help to highlight your areas of focus is to look at where youare in your business lifecycle.

1. Marketing Excellence - Are you at 80% of capacityor are you at the 80-100% level. Are you concerned the next big clientwill break some of your systems, perhaps leading to service and/orfulfillment failures? If not, continue to allocate a good deal of yourcompany time and effort on marketing, making this a driving criticalsuccess factor. If you answered yes, move forward to the next phase ofthe cycle - profitability.

2. Increasing Profitability - This is the time tore-evaluate all expenses. Find the waste and inefficiencies, using the80/20 rule as a guideline (first look at where 80% of your expensescome from and then analyze those for cost savings - you’ll find it’slikely only 20% of your line items!). Be sure you understand the profitmargins associated with each product line, markets and/or types ofcustomers. Should you drop certain product lines? What about firingcustomers - are there some you are losing money on? Once you know youare making the most from every revenue dollar, move forward to capacityand capability expansion.

3. Expand Capacity - In this phase, your focus shouldbe on securing funding for more space, equipment, people and otherresources. You may need to hire the right people to move you forward.The people who got you where you are today may not be the people whowill take you to the next level. This is the phase where manybusinesses get stuck. Which comes first - expansion or revenue growth?Growth requires increased capacity either through funding orreinvestment. After you’ve added capacity, you can move your focus ontoOperational Excellence.

4. Operational Excellence - You’re at marketsaturation, you’ve identified profit opportunities and you’ve expandedcapacity to grow. Now it’s time to kick operational excellence ino highgear. How do your processes and systems need to be updated? What canyou do better, faster, less expensively. Focus on where your corecompetencies are, or where you want them to be and where you can gaincompetitive advantage - this may involve outsourcing some areas thatcan be done better, and more cheaply, or it may mean rethinking howyour organization operates in total.

5. Innovate for life! - Of course, since we’retalking about cycles, there is never an end - to be a great company andbest serve your markets you need to adapt to new technologies, changesin the market and evolving customer needs. This requires a solidassessment of where you fit into the competitive field, how you’recurrently meeting customer needs and what outside forces are doing.Instill a culture of innovation and it will pervade every aspect of thelifecycle. Whether you’re in phase 4 or phase 1 - a new company or old,there’s always room for innovation. Which, in turn leads us back tostep one to look for more opportunities!