Blog Entries for Profitable growth

Getting back to basics in the new year

jbickerstaff@smartcompany.com.au — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:05:54 +0100

Simple is easy to say, hard to do, but gets profitable results. What can you simplify today?

Most often in business we focus on what we can do more of. What features can we add to our product? What new product line can we add? What new customer segment can we go after? What new hires should we add?

But the trouble with 'more' is that it adds complexity and complexity adds inefficiency. Doing "more" often leads to a decrease in profitability, quite the opposite of what was in [...]

Are you upsetting your best customers?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Have you ever been tempted to lower your prices to win new customers? Go on, be honest, you have haven't you?

And why not? It's a popular tactic.

Here's how it's, um, meant to work. Customers sign up with your business because of the low price. They fall in love with your product/service. You pop the price up after the honeymoon period. And they carry on buying from you because you have proved how fabulous your product/service is.

Right?

Wrong.

The fi [...]

How to make working with big businesses more profitable

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Having large businesses as clients can be great for a (relatively) small business. Not least because big business can give you a decent flow of regular work, can pay a good price and make a good 'testimonial' client.

But they can also be a pain in the derriere to deal with.

In fact, when you work out the hours you spend in the lead up to winning work with a big business – the negotiations on price and then the 'client care' once they are on board – suddenly that deal with t [...]

It's time to get serious about your 2012 to-do list

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0100

With less than 100 days of 2012 to go, will you finish the year as you hoped when it started?

There are less than 100 days to go until the end of the year: only 96 in fact. So that's 96 days left to do all the stuff you wanted done by the end of 2012. How does that sound?

Let's think about the answer to that question in a little more detail. By December 31, 2012, will you have done all these things?

Will you have won the new work that you budgeted for at the start of [...]

How being forced to say 'no' can help you understand your business

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0100

I was having coffee with a CEO (let's call him James) the other day and he showed me his business's 'to-do' list. It was 35 pages long and each page had about 25 items on it.

That's, um, 875 activities.

I had a quick flick through the list thinking it would be full of quick little "fix it" type tasks. But it wasn't.

On the list were ideas for new products, different sales channels, new marketing avenues. It really was quite an amazing inventory of ideas.

Jame [...]

Stuff we know we should measure but don't

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Peter Drucker gave us the famous phrase, "What gets measured gets done". And isn't it true?

Never mind in business, it works in life.

Want to lose weight? Weigh yourself regularly and (ouch) share the news from the scales with your 'accountability' partner.

Want kids to help around the house? Give them a star chart and a reward and watch them go.

In business we get a bit stuck with what to measure though.

We measure stuff that our accounting software [...]

How much Work that Matters do you really do each week?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 22:56:57 +0100

Hmm, how much work do you do each week? Real work, that is. Work that Matters.

And what about your team? How much do they do?

It would be nice to think that most of your week was spent doing Work that Matters. Of course it won't be the entire week as there's plenty of stuff to do that gets in the way of good work: emails, meetings, crises, fun. But you'd think that a fair proportion of your week would be spent on Work that Matters, otherwise you'd be wasting the week. Agreed [...]

It takes forever to read our monthly management reports. Do we really need all this info?

ekrieger@smartcompany.com.au — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0100

There is a wonderful quote by Albert Einstein in which he says: "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."

I was reminded of this the other week when an enormous package landed on my door. The big bundle was last month's management report, accounts and "supporting schedules" for a business which, to give you an idea of size, employs about 30 people.

Because I was short on time I needed to prioritise the long [...]

Why do some of my management team never seem to have the time to get strategic stuff done?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0100

When you look at your management team, how is it that some people always manage to get their 'special projects' done while others just never seem to have the time?

Does this sound familiar? You kick-off your quarterly meeting with each member of the management team giving an update on the status of the projects they have been accountable for during the quarter.

It's been a very busy 12 weeks but Anne, Bob, Cate and Dave have completed their projects. They always do. On the o [...]

Has your business lost its sparkle?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Cast your mind back to when you started your business. Can you remember why you did it? Did it happen to be because the doyens of the industry had become old-fashioned and you, the upstart, could see a radical new way of doing it?

It was.

Right.

Let's talk about today then. How's it all going?

Lots of competition? Tricky times? And who's winning pitches ahead of you? Who's getting the staff you want to hire? Who's getting all the accolades?

It's not t [...]

Play to your obsession

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Have you noticed how many well-known entrepreneurs have obsessions?

Larry Page at Google has always been obsessed with speed. Steve Jobs at Apple was obsessed with simplicity. Tony Hsieh of Zappos is obsessed with customer service.

These guys demonstrate real obsession. Not just a skill, competence or good intention, but an all-out obsession. Their thoughts and work are dominated by the persistent idea of speed/simplicity/service.

I don't think you can manufacture a [...]

How to make 2012-13 a happy and profitable new financial year

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 22:41:35 +0100

Businesses get two shots at New Year reinvigoration – the calendar year version and the financial year version.

We need this "double dipping" as, having seen inside many a business, I can say that while most of us start the New (financial/calendar) Year with a long list of exciting projects, boundless enthusiasm, and a sense of anticipation, within a few weeks it's largely forgotten and replaced with operational "business as usual".

Here are eight tips to help you kick of [...]

"What gets measured gets done" – but could you be doing it too well?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 06:58:38 +0100

Peter Drucker, the management guru and great sage, gave us the phrase, "What gets measured gets done". It's a neat little one liner that's trotted out at many a management meeting, but do we really pay the right attention to it?

The WGMGD phrase is most often used to instil the virtues of KPIs. Set every person, every team, project, every function, every product, every region, etc, a neat collection of goals and KPIs and measure progress against them regularly. Because the KPIs are [...]

How to create goals for the future when you don't know what the future looks like

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Jim Collins (uber guru and author of Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall and Great by Choice) has brought us many strategic concepts.

One of his most popular is the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), which companies set as the goal for some faraway date – commonly 10 years – and then strive to achieve.

Defining the BHAG is often a task set for the management team to work on at one of their strategic planning days. Often it's kicked off with a sentence that goes s [...]

How can we get useful ideas from employees?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 29 May 2012 22:54:52 +0100

Years ago when I was a newbie in a big accounting firm I remember being asked for ideas on how to improve the business.

At the time I thought that my bosses were looking for really clever ideas so I got together with a few other newbies and we spent hours conjuring up amazing stuff to turn the accounting industry on its head. Or so we thought. Turns out we had no useful ideas and the only suggestion that got picked up was to lose the Girovend card (which entitled the bearer to 10 [...]

Do profit figures really motivate employees?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 22 May 2012 06:21:11 +0100

In the old days a company's numbers were kept secret from employees: Bosses not wanting the workers to know how much money was being made for fear of being tapped for a pay rise, and all that.

Now we've flipped around and share everything with employees. We reckon it's motivational, inspirational and, anyway, we've gotten over our fear of the pay rise question, so why not?

In particular we like to set and share lofty goals for revenue and profit. We got the message that the [...]

Here's a way to make all your employees strategic thinkers

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:00:00 +0100

It's not uncommon for a management team to lock itself away, develop a new strategy, present it to the rest of the company (with a big fanfare), and then be frustrated when nothing deep within the business actually seems to, er, change.

The employees on the other hand are curious about what happens when the management team go away for their strategy offsite, are interested to hear what the bosses present at the whole-of-company get together and then they wonder why nothing within th [...]

How to grow profit by pruning waste

jbickerstaff@smartcompany.com.au — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:00:00 +0100

In our search for profitable growth we often focus on the exciting stuff such as innovation and strategy or big ticket wins such as a major operational overhaul. But there are lots of little things that can contribute to profitable growth and one of these is watching the waste.

When I talk about waste I don’t mean the big projects or purchases that latterly turn out to have been a poor decision. These are experiments and are not waste as such (provided you learn from them) [...]

The secret of the most successful CEOs

jbickerstaff@smartcompany.com.au — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0100

In my work I get to see many entrepreneurs in action with their teams. Over the years I've noticed how the most successful ones are always reminding their teams about "why" they are in business. They really are the "Keepers of the Flame".

A great example of this in action was a highly charged management team meeting I happened to attend a few weeks ago. The team were debating an important decision but within a couple of minutes the discussion descended into a complete and [...]

The daily prioritisation technique: an easy way to improve efficiency and effectiveness

andrewmedia@internode.on.net — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 21:37:16 +0100

You don’t need me to tell you that time is our most precious resource. But in business we often don’t safeguard it very well.

Imagine if we looked after cash the way we looked after time? The monthly bank statement would be the size of the now defunct Encyclopedia Britannica, detailing pages and pages of tiny payments. And who would want to be the accountant trying to work out what it all related to? Not me for sure!

Of course it’s completely impractical to account for time [...]