One Year Thirty Minute Challenge | ClearVision Consulting

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 47 :: Marketing :: Target Clients

November 22, 2020 Tags: clayton christensen, empathy, marketing, Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, useful, value Mike Chirveno

Traditional marketing many times mimicked traditional product development. In traditional product development, a team of “experts” created a solution that – 1) they were enamored with, 2) represented a departure from current products in function, usability and/or experience, and 3) they hoped had commercial viability. Companies then turned those products over to traditional marketers who touted the features and benefits of the new offerings in hopes that someone would be willing to part with their hard-earned money and give it a try. In short, a solution in search of a problem. Once those few, brave early adopters surfaced, the marketers could look for others like them – target clients.

For decades, the bulk of “marketing science” was built around this approach. We learned about market segmentation, customer profiles, demographics, psychographics, geographics, behavioristics, and a host of other ways to segregate and talk to people who might be interested in our products or services. I’m not advocating that we abandon or unlearn all or even any of this, but instead broaden our field of knowledge. In recent years, new research in product development and marketing have the potential to make us much more effective in creating new offerings and communicating with those who are willing to buy them.

In Competing with Luck, Clayton Christensen helped us understand that the key to innovative product development is problem solving. Yogi Berra reminded us that, “you can observe a lot by watching.” Together, these two pieces of information give you everything you need to know to create a successful product. Carefully survey your slice of the world for a problem to solve. Then solve the problem better than anyone else.

Problems and the subsequent solutions can be simple – your smartphone slides across the dashboard or seat when you’re driving. You need a bracket that fits in your cupholder with a slot on the top to hold your phone. Or the problems can be more obscure – so obscure that you didn’t know you had the problem. Steve Jobs and the folks at Apple discovered that you needed a device bigger than your smartphone, but smaller than your laptop and viola, the iPad was born (along with a host of Android competitors). You didn’t know you needed a tablet, but, so far, about 1.5 billion of them have been sold worldwide. The potential upside of a product is in direct proportion to number of people that are afflicted by the problem that the product solves.

That brings us to this week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge.

For this week’s exercise, I want you to create a detailed definition of the problem you’re effectively solving (what is the cause, how does it manifest itself i.e. what are the first, second and third order consequences, what is the personnel impact, what is the financial impact, what is the emotional or psychological impact, what is the social impact) and identify the people who have that problem – those people are your target clients.

As you start the exercise, the most disturbing discovery could be that you’ve created a solution for a non-existent problem (or a problem that afflicts a number of people so small, that it’s not commercially viable). If that’s the case, it’s time to survey the landscape and look for a problem to solve.

Assuming you have a superior solution to a real problem experienced by enough people, the assignment becomes, how do you effectively communicate with the people afflicted by that problem. I want to offer up some bullet points –

Discover where the people who have that problem look for information to solve it – Google search, friends on social media, LinkedIn, from others in their industry, cold sales calls, email solicitation, Yelp, Angie’s List, networking groups.
Begin interacting with them, using their preferred medium, with information that convinces them you understand the depth of the problem – discuss multiple manifestations of the problem and discuss the impacts of the problem.
Empathize with them. To prove the depth of your understanding, discuss the way the problem makes them feel – frustrated, insecure, uncertain about the future.
Start being useful. Offer initial solutions to the problem. If you give away valuable information you show your care for your target clients and your commitment to solving their problem. And you build credibility as a trusted resource.
Explain your value proposition – you have a good, workable solution that makes sense economically. You can’t charge them $10 to solve a $1 problem
Let existing clients build your credibility. Show that you’ve successfully solved the problem for others by sharing testimonials, case studies, and white papers.
Reach out to individual target clients with personalized emails (or for B2B, LinkedIn messages). Invite them into one-to-one conversations where you can probe for information on how the problem you solve impacts them.

As you explain your intimate understanding of the problem, your understanding of those afflicted by the problem, the pain they feel as a result, the epiphany that brought you to your solution to the problem, the thoroughness of the solution, the economic value of the solution, and the passion you bring to delivering the solution, you will gain recognition among those with the problem and will be seen as a valuable resource. You will find those who, as Simon Sinek would say, “share your why” or as Seth Godin would say, belong to your tribe.

In every interaction, probe for additional opportunities to listen and deepen your understanding of the problem and how it impacts potential target clients. And, in every interaction, if the target client is ready to buy, make your products or services available with an easy-to-follow call to action.

During this week’s thirty-minute exercise, gather your team together. After you’ve defined the problem in sufficient detail, make your initial pass through the list above. Make notes. Decide on your initial medium and messaging.

As you get started, resist the temptation to be perfect. Just start. Experiment with messaging and medium. Every time you get a response, increase your understanding of the problem and how it affects your target clients. Soon you’ll be effectively communicating with the people you’ve built your business to help.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 46 :: Culture :: Confront the Brutal Facts

November 15, 2020 Tags: bias for action, humility, transparency, truth Mike Chirveno

In 1546, English author John Heywood wrote, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” The formative years of my working life were spent in a declining industry. The descent was steep, but it became a lot steeper because people leading the organization failed to confront the brutal facts – in our particular case, the commercial use of the internet. As revenues declined, there was a lot of “whistling through the graveyard”. Revenue was going directly to online competitors. Our “creative destruction” in response to the new online world looked more like repainting the bathroom instead of tearing down the house. In the late 1990s, I wrote a capital request for the purchase of a new management information system. The proposal included adding capabilities that leveraged our address specific data with address specific data from area utilities and presenting them together in an online portal. I proposed selling address-specific online billing services (we would have been the first) and selling the data to companies with an interest in address-specific information (realtors, home services). I was told to take that section out of my capital request because we didn’t need it.

In my opening quote, Heywood wasn’t disparaging those who couldn’t see, but those who wouldn’t see.

In his 2011 book, Good to Great, Jim Collins encouraged business leaders to confront the brutal facts. Since I began consulting in 2006, it’s been my unfortunate discovery that running from the truth is a common practice in many organizations. We know we should fire that disruptive employee. We know we should find a new vendor to replace that underperforming one. We know we should abandon that underperforming product or location, but we have an emotional attachment to it. But in every case, we don’t.

In week 26 of the One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge, I listed my Cultural Imperatives. Confronting the brutal facts is one of them. Just like Mentor Mindset in week 4 and Lifelong Learning in week 16, Confronting the Brutal Facts deserves its own One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge.

So how do you create an organization that actively pursues the truth and has the organizational fortitude to act on it? In this week’s exercise, I want you to critique your organization. I want you to look for truth-hiding behavior, check for practices that proactively unearth unpleasant truths, root out people not committed to radical transparency, and create or strengthen organizational backbone that acts based on the true picture the facts paint.

Let’s jump in –

Truth Hiding Behaviors

You’ve rebuffed a peer or subordinate telling them, “Don’t bring me problems, only bring me solutions.” Maybe they don’t have a solution and since they don’t, they fail to pass along information that is vital to the future of your organization.
You spot a new competitor, but discount them because you think the management of the company is weak or the initial product or service is subpar. Managers can grow and products can evolve. Better to take the threat seriously and ask, “Why did they think there was room in my space for a new entrant? What is deficient in my product or delivery that makes them think there is opportunity?”
You get negative feedback from an unreliable source (less-than-stellar employee, always-complaining customer, or new, unproven vendor). Go ahead and explore their feedback. As my former boss used to say, “Even a wild boar finds a hickory nut every now and then.”
A problem keeps surfacing and a peer or subordinate suggests that you’re the cause (your style, time management, lack of planning). You’ve discounted that feedback because you’ve successfully run the business for a number of years.

Unearthing Unpleasant Truths

Make sure bad news can easily travel up and down in your organization. Make sure there are no reprisals for “truth tellers.” As a matter of fact, recognize their efforts in getting all the facts on the table.
Proactively ask for feedback from employees, customers, and suppliers. Make phone calls and send surveys. Take the totality of the feedback to make a balanced, accurate picture of what it’s like to work at your company, purchase products or services from your company or sell to your company.
Engage the services of a third party who can bring a fresh perspective. Maybe a consultant, an advisory board or business-owner peer from a networking group.
Trust the data over your gut. Twenty years of experience can make you think you’re invincible. Twenty years of connection can also make you emotionally tied to a person, place, or thing that needs to go.

Root out People Not Committed to Radical Transparency

Commit first and foremost to the purpose of the organization. Our natural inclination is to want to be right. Instead of putting a premium on being right, in your organization, put a premium on the pursuit of truth.
Embrace humility. As Ryan Holiday noted in Ego is the Enemy, “If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”
Engage in vigorous discussions. Build trust inside your team so that you can talk to each other about failures in execution, faulty plans and blown opportunities. The momentary discomfort of discussing individual lapses must be subordinate to the importance of resolving nagging problems or the exploiting of looming opportunities. If a team member can’t exist in this environment, seriously consider their future in the organization.
Squash every form of defensive behavior. When you hear things you’d rather not hear about your organization, your product or your people, resist the temptation to defend. Instead, figure out what you can learn from the feedback and teach your team to do the same.

Strengthen Your Organizational Backbone

Adopt an execution framework that will help you put “feet” on your fact-driven initiatives. There are several good ones available. I like The 4 Disciplines of Execution, EOS, and I have my own, The Business Framework.
Don’t let problems linger. Pursue continuous improvement. Create a bias for action.
Build accountability inside the organization. Hold others accountable and have others hold you accountable.

When you finish your critique, pull your team together for a heartfelt chat. If you’ve failed to confront the brutal facts in the past, apologize and commit to do it in the future. Prioritize radical transparency, organizational truth-telling, and fact-based decision-making. Act courageously based on the truth.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 45 :: Governance :: On the Business vs In the Business

November 7, 2020 Tags: culture, governance, in the business, on the business, priority Mike Chirveno

Working ON the business instead of IN the business. I’m not sure he was the first one to introduce the phrase, but I’m pretty sure no one was more responsible for making it a permanent part of our business lexicon than Michael Gerber in his 1986 book, The E Mtyh. He told us something we all know deep down. Entrepreneurs aren’t superheroes. They’re not imbued with specials power that let them build a business from scratch and become successful and wealthy while the rest of us work for someone else. He did, however, teach us that those entrepreneurs who reach the tipping point and build a real business (as opposed to those who just created a job for themselves) learned how to work ON their business and not just IN it.

However, working IN the business isn’t just the affliction of novice entrepreneurs who haven’t made the leap. All of us fall can fall prey to the tyranny of daily, transactional work that isn’t in the best long-term interest of the organization. So, in this week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge, we want to create a framework that you and your team can use to keep your focus on long-term organizational health and do it in a way that fits each person’s responsibilities in the organization.

There’s no “right” percentage of your work week you should be devoting to working ON the business instead of IN it. But the farther you are up the food chain, the higher the percentage should be. If you’re the big boss, the overwhelming majority of your work should be devoted to organizational health, staff development, and business growth. For those farther down the food chain, the mix can and should change to allow for more operational responsibilities (working IN the business).

Let’s jump in. I want you to do a couple of things during your 30 minute exercise this week – identify the best “ON the business” activities you can prioritize during your week AND add some tools to your toolbox that will help you protect your ON the business time.

I can’t tell you all the activities that best constitute working ON the business for you and your organization, but I want to give you a starter list. Jot the ones that resonate with you into Evernote or on a notepad. At the end of the exercise, we’re going to use them.

Spend time on personal growth – Read a book, listen to a podcast, take a class, go to a conference. Your organization will most likely never grow beyond you. Learn from people who don’t agree with you philosophically, who work in other industries, and who have already walked this road before you. Synthesize the new things you learn – How do they fit with what you know already? How do they conflict with what you know already? How should what you have learned impact the organization?
Devote time to staff development – How can you prepare your direct reports for more responsibilities, including assuming your job? What parts of their performance are deficient? Do they have sufficient cross-discipline understanding? How well are they developing their team so that their eventual replacement is ready? Are they creating sufficient margin in their operational responsibilities, so they have time to devote to working ON the business? Is there talent missing in the organization?
Examine meaningful metrics – Have you identified the metrics that are truly indicative of organizational health? If so, are you tracking them faithfully and making course corrections based on the data? Are you pushing them down through the organization so that everyone knows whether or not the organization is “winning”?
Evaluate your value creation activities – Are you solving your customer’s problems more effectively than others in your industry? If not, why not? What changes can you make to your value creation activities so that you are creating value better than your competitors? Can you improve delivery of your product or service so that customers are less likely to defect?
Survey the industry landscape – Are there new, capable competitors in the industry? How does their offering or delivery differ from yours? Where are your products in the product life cycle? Are any successor products on the horizon? If so, what is the right response right now? Are there any regulatory changes that could alter the dynamic in your industry? Are there any shifts in the macroenvironment that that could impact your industry or business – financial (cost of money, availability of credit), technology, cultural norms, environmental norms?
Spend time with several stakeholder groups – Get out of the office for meaningful dialog with team members, customers, vendors, shareholders and more. Ask good questions. Probe for understanding when it comes to things that are hindering them in value creation activities. Synthesize all the information you receive to get to the “truth”. Recognize that the information you receive from each stakeholder group is colored by their experience and interests. Remember, “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
Guard the culture – Nothing is more important than modeling the culture and communicating the culture. Every stakeholder group needs to see you exhibit and explain the “____ Company Way” to treat each other, customers, vendors, and shareholders and how to approach work.

If those are ways to work ON the business, what do you do when the daily press of work tries to drag you back to working IN the business? These tools will help.

Reframe the task – When an urgent operational problem lands on your desk, identify the process that failed (a flaw in the order process, an untrained employee, tech that failed, a vendor that didn’t deliver) and fix both the immediate problem and the root cause. If you traceback every time, you’re stopping the problem from happening again by improving organizational health.
Say no – Some urgent matters don’t deserve your attention. Someone else can worry about the malfunctioning garage door in the warehouse. Ego would like you to jump up from your desk and save the day, but working on the business requires you to say, “Have Mary in the warehouse call the company we used last time. And next time we have a problem with garage doors, you can go straight to Mary. She can take care of it.”
Put employees first – Every urgent problem screams to be solved now. It’s almost always faster for you to solve the problem yourself. Resist the temptation. Instead, use it as a training opportunity. Grab the one, two, or six people that could solve this problem (if they knew what you knew) and walk them through the resolution – patiently answering every question. The next time this surfaces, hand it off to one of them and go back to working ON the business.
Go from the outside in – Keep problem-solving customer centric. Challenge team members to, instead of consulting you, do what’s best for the customer. Only if they’re unsure of what that is, can they interrupt you.
Be accountable – None of us are immune from being pulled under by the current of urgent problems. Consequently, we need to give others in the organization permission to call us out when we’re spending too much time working IN the business instead of ON it.

Lots of time management techniques fail miserably because they’re built around open slots on a calendar. Here’s an observation. I always have enough “IN the business” tasks to fill my entire week. Take the tasks from the “ON the business” list and put them on the calendar. Then, let nothing displace them. If the building is on fire, put it out, then return to your “ON the business” task for that day and finish it. If something has to push, let it be one of the “IN the business” tasks – don’t worry, it will be there tomorrow.

If you want a healthy organization with engaged employs and increasing revenue, this is the only way. You can never work IN the business enough to make it happen.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 44 :: Strategic Planning :: Absorptive Capacity

October 31, 2020 Tags: absorptive capacity, disequilibrium, react, respond Mike Chirveno

One of the most disconcerting things any business leader contends with is “disequilibrium”. Disequilibrium is that queasy feeling when what you think you know for sure is, all of a sudden, in question. One moment, your world is tidy – all the pieces make sense – and now, suddenly, it doesn’t. Disequilibrium happens in all parts of life, not just work – faith, relationships, health, and the list goes on. But for this week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge, we’ll discuss work.

Sales are humming along. Everyone loves your product. You have to beat customers off with a stick. And then, a little-known competitor introduces a product that upends your industry. Customers flock to your competitor and your revenue plummets. Yesterday, revenue projections for the next couple of quarters looked stellar. Today, with the money on hand, you’ll only be able to make payroll for 8 more weeks.

Now what? Disequilibrium – that situation when new information comes into your world and throws everything you know out of sync – reveals your Absorptive Capacity. Absorptive Capacity is the ability to synthesize the new information you’ve received, reconcile it to what you knew before, and respond in a way that reflects your new understanding – all while pushing towards your vision and fulfilling your mission.

Before jumping into this week’s exercise, let’s illustrate with an incredibly over-simplified example. You sell cameras and the film that goes inside those cameras. People point the camera at an image, push a button and the image is etched on the film. After those people have taken a few dozen of those pictures, they send the film to a third party that puts the film through a process and prints the images from the film on special paper. That’s how pictures are made. Everyone knows that. Then, one day, you learn of a new camera. People point that camera at an image, push a button and the image is translated into millions of electronic picture elements (pixels) organized on a grid and saved on a silicon chip. No film. No third party. No printing on paper. The little chip holds hundreds of images. And the images are completely portable and can be sent to other people using a variety of electronic devices. You’ve just experienced disequilibrium. What you thought you knew about taking pictures has been disrupted with new, confusing information.

What you do next determines what your business will look like going forward. You can deny the new information – “the way we do pictures is what customers will want forever”, “this is a passing fad”, “this will never be commercially viable”. Or, you can demonstrate your Absorptive Capacity by synthesizing the new information and begin making positive progress towards your vision armed with an updated understanding of the environment in which you compete.

Let’s jump into this week’s exercise. It’s not possible to engineer a moment of disequilibrium. That’s part of the reason they’re so jarring. They come out of the blue. So, for this week’s exercise, we want to create a framework that you can use to lead yourself and your team through these events when they come. In that framework, we want to strengthen your organization’s Absorptive Capacity so you emerge from disequilibrium stronger and more prepared to reach your vision.

Understand exactly what’s threatened by the new information – Is your entire business model in jeopardy (like the camera illustration above)? Is your workforce in danger of being poached (a large employer with deep pockets is building a new plant in your city and will be hiring thousands)? Are your customer’s expectations likely to radically change (better product available, better pricing for a competing product)? What problem is being solved now more effectively than you were solving it before? This is no time to “whistle while you walk through the graveyard”. Instead it’s time for radical truth-telling. Get your most trusted team members together and ask hard questions. Talk to current and existing customers to gauge their response to the new information (depending on the information, it might or might not affect them). Define the breadth and depth of the impact from the new information.

Identify the downstream effects – What’s the impact on revenue? Does existing equipment become obsolete? Do existing core competencies become meaningless? Does customer acquisition messaging need to be reworked? Is your cost of goods sold or customer pricing impacted?

Envision the new reality – Clearly, no one has a crystal ball, but using your best judgment, envision the new world created with the new information. Who will win? Who will lose? What will the winners have done to win? What will the losers have done (or not done) to lose? What vendor resources will become important? What will be important to employees? What will be important to customers? What will be important to other stakeholders – shareholders, regulators, vendors?

Create alternatives – With your new, expanded understanding create multiple scenarios that make sense in the new reality. For each scenario, push towards effective value creation and push towards fulfilling your vision. Can new, capable competitors become strategic partners? Can new, capable competitors become acquisition targets? Should you become an acquisition target for a new, capable competitor? Can you successfully emulate a new product or service offering? Can you move up or down in the value creation chain? Is there talent you need to acquire now? Are there assets you need to jettison now? What becomes the new, valuable core competency?

Leverage existing knowledge and experience – When faced with a challenge, your gut reaction is to do what you already do except to it faster, with more intensity, and with higher quality. I get it. But, if you’re riding a bicycle, you’ll never go faster or farther or carry more than your new, capable competitor who’s driving a delivery van. That’s where your knowledge and experience become your competitive advantage. You know the limits of your current team, your current model and the needs and wants of your customer base.

Leverage existing relationships – Tap the collective genius of employees, vendors, and even customers. If you don’t have one already, establish a true idea meritocracy – an environment where the best idea wins the day – no matter whose idea it is. Beware of the HIPPO (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

Look for meaning in adjacent areas – Does the new information or the new reality it produces allow you to pivot to an adjacent area? Many years ago, during a downturn in general aviation sales, manufacturers of small planes become subcontractors for commercial airline manufacturers (whose business was booming) building wings, tail sections and other subassemblies for them. Can you leverage existing capabilities into new opportunities?

Look for meaning in other industries – Are there other industries that were faced with a similar situation? How did the players in those industries respond? How did the actions of the winners differ from the actions of the losers?

Fire bullets – When you’re ready to test your responses, as much as possible, fire bullets – small, controlled, cheap tests to evaluate the promise of that response. Tweak and test again until you have an effective response to the new reality. You can read about firing bullets in an earlier One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge.

Measure and adjust – As you roll out your new response, measure the factors that accurately indicate that you’ve successfully reacted to the new environment. It might be things like no decrease in customer retention, no loss of revenue, no increase in cost of goods sold, stable customer satisfaction scores or, depending on your unique situation, a whole different set of measurements. Whatever the metric, continue to evolve your response as the metrics dictate.

The speed of change in the competitive environment continues to accelerate. And the magnitude of the changes continues to increase. Increasing your Absorptive Capacity is a critical skill to ensure that your business continues to not only stay relevant but prospers in an increasingly turbulent business environment.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 43 :: Finance :: Operating Budget

October 24, 2020 Tags: capital budgets, deliberate, finance, operating budgets, profitability Mike Chirveno

According to a survey by Clutch, 61% of small business owners did not create an annual operating budget. As the number of employees shrunk, the likelihood of a business creating an annual budget shrunk even more – 74% of businesses with 1-10 employees did not create a budget. Unsurprisingly, in another Clutch survey, 35% of small business owners listed unforeseen expenses as their top financial challenge.

An operating budget certainly doesn’t insulate you from unforeseen expenses, but it does force you to deliberately examine projected revenue and expense numbers for the upcoming financial period. The exercise, if done correctly, will make you prove, with real math, that your strategic and operational plans are going to deliver the financial results you desire.

Earlier in the One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge we looked at capital budgeting. Operating budgets differ radically from capital budgets. Capital budgets deal with large-ticket items that are depreciated over several years. Their purchase is not reflected in an operating budget. Operating budgets deal with income and expense projections for an upcoming fiscal period. Money that is typically both earned and spent in that period.

Operating budgets are based on assumptions – assumptions like “what we pay for utilities will stay the same”, “we will have no major customer defections”, “our health care premiums will go up 10%” and on and on. At the beginning of the budgeting period, you’ve got to validate every assumption as much as possible. It’s also prudent to document assumptions so everyone involved knows the “facts” the budget was built on. To illustrate, in 2020, you should assess and state your assumption about the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on your organization in 2021 – it will be a distant memory, we’ll be somewhat impacted, it will still be a major factor for us or somewhere across that spectrum.

Clearly, your 30-minute exercise this week isn’t long enough to pull together a budget, so the goal is to pull together a budget plan, get the plan to the right people and be able to clearly explain your budget methodology.

According to the Corporate Finance Institute, there are four methods for putting together an operating budget –

Incremental – Start with last year’s actual revenue and expense numbers and ratchet them up or down based on a percentage or on anticipated changes in specific budget categories. I’m not a fan of this methodology, since it’s easy to perpetuate a budget that might have been built incorrectly in the beginning. And, it might be feeding budget categories that are no longer relevant to the success of the business.
Activity-based – Begins with revenue targets then fleshes out the expenses needed to reach those revenue targets. This methodology works well for “cost of goods sold” expenses but might be a bit unruly when building the underlying administrative costs.
Value proposition – Requires every expense to be tied back to some value creation activity for the customer, employee, shareholder, or other stakeholder. I like the premise here because, truly, if an activity doesn’t bring value, then why do it?
Zero-based – Every single budget line begins at zero. From scratch, you must build every line item. Consequently, the existence of the line item and the amount must be justified. I like this one also, because of the discipline required and the scrutiny given to each entry.

You can choose one of these methodologies or a hybrid of two or three. The methodology takes a backseat to the real reason for doing a budget – to correctly fund value creation activities so that projected revenue goals are met or exceeded and expenses are right-sized so that all stakeholders receive returns that cement their relationship to the company. This incredibly important point deserves a bit more attention. Customer facing activities must be sufficiently funded so that purchasers receive a product or service that exceeds their expectations and is delivered in a way that makes them feel good about their purchase. Employee compensation must keep value producers inside the organization happy and engaged and not looking for employment elsewhere. Shareholders must receive a sufficient return so their investment in the organization continues to be justified. A similar calculation must be made for every stakeholder in the organization.

Let’s jump into a few mechanics for budget building.

Involve the people ultimately accountable for hitting the numbers – The directors and managers who will reap the rewards or bear the consequences for financial performance for the budget entity (department, division, business unit) must create the budget for that entity. If they’re smart, they’ll involve other team members who will impact that entity’s performance.
Simultaneously work bottom up and top down – Expectations for profitability should be communicated down and needs for funding value creation activities should be communicated up. The organization’s desired endgame should be baked into the company culture and should be a regularly discussed topic in the organization, so there shouldn’t be any surprises here. This is just an annual exercise dedicated to examining the financial manifestations of what you’re after every day.
Use tools that make sense – A smaller organization might get away with an Excel template used by everyone in the organization. Larger organizations probably want to opt for some of the more robust budgeting tools available.
Use the right level of detail – In your office supply category, you don’t need a line item for pencils, another for staples and another for paper clips. If you do, you have the wrong people in charge. Budgets reflect the level of autonomy in that business entity.
Budgets should include contingencies, but those building the budgets should know that the ultimate determinant of investment is value creation – I’m in favor of adding some contingencies to a budget (for unforeseen circumstances – overtime, equipment failure, opportunity to capture an emergent opportunity), but ultimately, every expenditure in an organization should be about value creation. If a situation arises that affords an opportunity for value creation, even though that opportunity was not apparent at budget creation time, the person responsible for that budget entity should know that they can come to you with that opportunity and not be chastised for considering something “not in the budget.”
Budgets function as a “reality check” for projected revenue and projected expense – Let’s say your budgeted revenue reflects the sale of 3 million widgets. What is the sales commission for 3 million widgets? What is the cost of raw materials for 3 million widgets? What is the labor cost for 3 million widgets (that requires that you know how long it takes to make each individual widget)? Will any overtime be required to produce 3 million widgets? Is the present capacity of your plant sufficient to produce 3 million widgets? What does it cost to ship 3 million widgets? Will the production of 3 million widgets force you to add another shift? What will be the cost of supervisors for that shift? Are all those items in your budget? The budgeting process is the mechanism that ensures you’ve accurately identified and synced all of the revenue and costs associated with the value creation activities that get you to your financial targets.
At some point in the process, check your work against industry benchmarks – I’m not a big “best practices” person. Every “best practice” was once a wild idea gambled on by some innovative thinker. I’d prefer to put my money on the innovative thinker. However, that being said, it’s not a bad idea to check your work against your competitors – just to make sure you’re not missing something. For instance, you can easily find stats on what percent of revenue is spent on Information Technology in your industry. If your competitors are spending 4% of revenue on IT and you’re spending 2%, maybe you’re not being thrifty. Maybe you’re missing opportunities to automate work or offer new tech-enabled products.
Bake in profit margins at the budget level – If you want to make a profit of 20%, make sure your revenue and expense projections enforce that margin. Engineer the value creation activities until you’ve pushed the revenue and expense numbers far enough apart to hit your profit target.

Get the responsible parties together and lay out your plan. If this is your first budget, it’s important to explain your rationale. It’s all about the discipline – the same reason you do a strategic plan or any other deliberate planning activity. It’s the opportunity to step away from the press of all the things that clamor for your attention and focus on, in this case, the finances of your organization.

After your budget is in place, check your performance against it regularly. Make it a part of your balanced scorecard. When opportunities come to deviate from it, use it as a development opportunity for your staff as you discuss the rationale behind decisions to “stick to it” or “stray from it”.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 42 :: Marketing :: Five Forces Plus 1

October 18, 2020 Tags: Competitive Environment, Five Forces, Michael Porter Mike Chirveno

When vending your products and services, you spend a lot of time pressing out –

You create new products and services you believe current and potential customers will want
You tweak existing products and service to keep them attractive to current and potential customers
You improve the customer experience to encourage loyalty and decrease defection
You create new messaging to tell your story in a more compelling way

But, any healthy assessment of an organization’s competitive environment asks the question, “What is pressing back against us?” Competitors, customers, vendors, and the environment at large are always changing. So, in addition to the proactive “pressing out”, you must counterpunch – not necessarily responding tit-for-tat, but tracking what’s going on around you and responding when advantageous.

Michael Porter introduced his “Five Forces Model” in 1979. Forty years later, it’s still an effective way to examine the competitive forces in your industry. In the mid-1990s, a sixth force was added to the model (some folks have credited it to Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO).

In this week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge, we’re going to walk through the six forces and ask questions that will help you look critically at what is “pressing back” at you. Then, more importantly, we’ll suggest some “counterpunching” options you can evaluate with you team.

Rivalry among existing competitors – Other companies serving the same customers, offering products similar to yours, pose, in some ways, the stickiest problem. The gut reaction to lower prices only sets up a race to the bottom as each competitor settles for less and less revenue to pick up a few more points of market share. Competing on price is an unsustainable tactic. So, for products that are largely undifferentiated, what can you do instead? The short answer is to change the basis of competition. Overnight package delivery is big business, but since the end result is a package moved from point A to point B overnight, it’s highly undifferentiated. The competitors in this industry have done a good job of turning our attention to unique competencies that distinguish them from their competitors – package tracking and outsourced logistics provider to name a couple. So, if you find yourself in a slugfest with a capable competitor, consider this –

Are the products or services truly undifferentiated or have you done a substandard job explaining your unique value proposition?
If they are truly indistinguishable (electrical outlet covers, for instance), can you shift the basis of competition to a unique delivery competency or customer experience?
Can you move up or down to premium or economy versions of the product and capture an “end” of the market?
Can you leverage the competencies that allow you to create this product and use them in a “blue ocean” – one that’s free from the bloody red waters of your war with current competitors?

Threat of New Entrants – If you’re making money, someone else would love to make it as well. Any successful enterprise is going to draw the attention of existing companies looking for new opportunities and startups looking to crash a successful party. There’s an important discipline that comes into play here that we discussed in an earlier One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge – Creative Destruction. Creative Destruction is the practice of scrutinizing your current products and processes to make sure they are impervious to competitors and, if they are not, replacing them so that they are. If you’re not engaging in this exercise, potential new entrants will be. So, how do we stave off new entrants?

Build a great database and communicate with the people in it frequently. In theory, you know infinitely more about your market than a new entrant does. Use your experience to be a better listener, understanding the needs of the market more accurately than potential new entrants. Tell your story in a meaningful way.
Give great service. Don’t give customers a reason to look elsewhere for the same good or service.
Leverage the learning curve that you’ve already ascended. That learning curve should translate into better vendor relationships, more mature processes, and consequently, lower costs. You should be able to price match or even undercut a new entrant and still make more money because your costs are lower.
One last, more radical, idea. If a new competitor is exceedingly capable, maybe you should buy them. Unless they are incredibly well capitalized, they might have shot the wad creating their new product or service.

Threat of Substitute Products – This force is different from competition with existing rivals because it considers enterprises competing for the same dollars – going to the movie theater vs streaming a movie at home or playing mini-golf vs going to the movie theater. Substitute products can span industry types – gym membership (a service) vs buying a Peloton bike (a product with an optional subscription service). Value creation is always a holy grail exercise, but, in this case, it’s really the entire discussion. How can you create an offering of surpassing value for this particular dollar?

What is the desired end result for this expenditure? Get healthy, be entertained, not be hungry any more, be confident that my car is safe and reliable again?
What stands in the way of the customer achieving that goal? How can you most efficiently and convincingly eradicate those obstacles?
What pushes them closer to that goal? How can you most efficiently and convincingly show them that your solution takes them faster and farther towards that goal?
How can you communicate that you “get it” and that your methodology for reaching their goal affords them complete control, provides the biggest bang for the buck, overcomes all of their objections and checks every box – or at least checks the boxes better than all available alternatives?

Bargaining Power of Customers – You know intuitively that customers have power, but in some circumstances their power is outsized. If a customer’s defection leaves you with a ton of unrecovered acquisition costs (i.e. it cost you a bunch of money to get the customer to buy the first time and they’ve not made enough purchases to offset those costs) or, on the other end of the spectrum, if one or two customers represent such a large part of your revenue that their departure could cripple or destroy your company, those customers exercise substantial control over your company.

It seems a counterintuitive, but how can you inflict some pain on the customer if they leave? I, of course, don’t mean real pain, but something like loyalty points or a discount that can only be redeemed on a future purchase. Withhold that benefit until they transact more business.
If your product or service is a bit more sophisticated, can you introduce some switching costs into the equation? If you provide a service like accounting or tax preparation, institute an onboarding regimen that involves a thorough (but valuable) data-gathering exercise where you not only gather historical financial data but discuss future financial goals. The prospect of spending that time again, with a new provider, might dissuade them from defecting.
If one customer represents a significant percentage of your revenue (high customer concentration in finance lingo) there are a couple of things you might want to consider. If you service only one industry, can you solicit other potential clients in that industry and leverage your deep industry expertise? If servicing competitors poses a problem for your large client, change geography so that prospective client bases don’t overlap. Or, look for ways to leverage the skills you are using to service that client and find other industries where those skills are in demand. Project management, software development, process improvement and a host of other skills are highly transferrable.

Bargaining Power of Suppliers – The risk with a powerful supplier is three-fold. They can drive up your costs with price increases because the materials they supply are unique or scarce. They can halt or cripple your value creation activities by being late or erratic in delivery. Or they can negatively affect your quality by providing products that perform inconsistently.

How can you create a partnership with a powerful supplier? How can you configure your relationship so that successes and failures are shared? For example, a retroactive per piece payment or bonus payment if every shipment in the previous quarter was on time and the defect rate was below 1%? Or penalty payments, a .5% reduction in unit cost for each hour the production line was out of service because of a stockout on the part the vendor supplies?
How can you give them greater visibility into your processes so they can see how their product is utilized and when it will be reordered next (so they can prepare for production)?
How can you leverage their expertise to improve quality and drive down costs as you contemplate future versions of their product? How early can you bring them into the discussion? If you help them build ease of manufacturing into future versions, costs can come down.

Complimentary Products – We are awash in manifestations of this competitive force – razors and blades, phones and cases, phones and apps, printers and ink – and the list goes on. But, leveraging this for competitive advantage has some fairly straightforward components.

Can you clearly see the beginning and ending of the complementary wave you’re riding? If you make cell phone cases, you’ll be retooling every 8-12 months. If you make ink cartridges for printers, a model could be in use for several years. Complimentary products also vary in complexity – a VHS tape had moving parts, a DVD had none.
Will you be directly benefitting from both sides of the equation? Will you be making razors and blades or will you only be making blades?
If the complimentary products are in the tech realm, is the successor technology likely to be in your wheelhouse? Streaming video is not at all like Blu-Ray Players and Blu-Ray discs. Can you be proficient in and can you afford to play in very disparate spaces?

In almost every case, the things you do to press out will be more important than the things that are pressing in, but you can’t ignore the environment in which you complete.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 41 :: Leadership :: Hard Skills and Soft Skills

October 10, 2020 Tags: employee development, hard skills, soft skills Mike Chirveno

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve collectively “seen the light” on hard skills vs. soft skills. To maximize our own effectiveness as a leader, we know we need both hard skills and soft skills. When we screen potential employees, we’ve added tools to assess not just hard skills – proficiency in a particular programming language, driving a forklift, tax planning, creating a PowerPoint deck – but also soft skills. We want to know if the potential team member is empathetic, a team player, a good communicator, a good problem solver and more.

You and every employee in your organization come to the office, factory, hospital, or studio with a unique combination of personality, innate abilities, life experiences, and education that has shaped your current set of hard skills and soft skills. Those factors have an oversized influence on how easily you’ll be able to continue honing those existing skills and adding new ones. Those with healthy self-awareness are a leg up on those who are blissfully ignorant of their own skills deficit. Those with good lateral thinking skills might have an advantage over those with only vertical thinking skills (depending on the new skill they are trying to master).

This week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge is an exercise in adding soft skill and hard skill components to your employee development program. If you don’t have an employee development program (you need one), you can find a framework HERE.

A good Employee Development Program aligns the interests of the employee with the interests of the company. Achieving growth goals benefits the organization and the individual. As goals are determined and milestones are set, a mix of hard skill and soft skill mastery punctuates the path.

Translating the learning of a hard skill to employee development exercises is straightforward –

Read a manual
Take a class (online or in-person)
Become an apprentice

And proving mastery of the skill is equally objective

Take a test
Demonstrate a technique
Produce a product
Speak the new language

You get the idea.

But I’m afraid mastering a new soft skill seems “squishier”. It is, after all, a soft skill. So, how can we integrate soft skill development activities into our employee development program. HR sites are chock-full of lists of desirable soft skills. You’ll find items like empathy, teamwork, communication, problem-solving, work ethic, creativity, adaptability and many, many more. So, during that employee development meeting, how are you going to get that team member to learn empathy and how are they going to prove they did it?

Since none of us have a magic Geiger-counter that we can wave over a teammate and detect empathy, problem-solving or any other soft skill, we have to translate that skill into actions we can use to teach the skill and to evaluate mastery of that skill. In employee development meetings, we need to connect the dots between the desired soft skill and the action so the team member is mindful, “When I do this action, I’m giving outward evidence of this soft skill.”

So, here’s this week’s exercise. For your direct reports, make a list of the hard skills and soft skills you’d like them to add in the next 12 months – it shouldn’t be more than 1 or 2 of each. For each of the skills, identify the how. For the hard skills, it might be take a class or work with another team member who has that skill and is able to act as a mentor (that mentor might be you). For the soft skills, translate them into observable, executable actions that the employee can begin to practice. To give you a head start, I’m giving you a few activities that translate into some of the most sought-after soft skills.

Listen when you’d normally offer an opinion – This change in behavior can help build empathy, synthesis (creating a “mash up” of previously uncombined ideas, methodologies or technologies) and problem-solving. Don’t listen to respond better. Listen to understand more fully. Practice active listening activities like notetaking, repeating back the salient points of the speaker in your own words and nodding your head when the speaker says something you agree with.
Ask good questions – When you’re tempted to start a conversation with statement, use a question instead. Replace, “Send out an email blast to all our existing customers announcing our new extended warranty” with “What do you think about using an email blast to announce our new extended warranty?” Use a methodology like the “5 Whys” to probe deeper if you feel like the current discussion is addressing a “branch” and not the “root” of an issue. Questions promote teamwork, collaboration and the ensuing conversation provides an opportunity to practice the mentor mindset.
Look for the common ground first – Team members with a more operational bent can sometimes easily find the ten problems a new initiative will create without acknowledging the upside of the initiative (they see the upside, but they quickly run to solve the problems first, so the initiative can work). On purpose, acknowledge the upside of new ideas before jumping into areas of disagreement or potential problems. If you can’t get on board at all with the methodology, see if you can agree that they’ve identified a problem worth solving, “I couldn’t agree more that we have to solve this hold time problem. Let’s hammer away at this and see if we can figure out the best customer experience possible.” This approach fosters collaboration and problem-solving.
Deliberately get out of your intellectual comfort zone – Read a book or listen to a podcast authored by someone that doesn’t share your political bent, professional expertise or approach to life. For the content that espouses a different perspective, the opportunity to hold two differing opinions in your head at the same time (yours and the author’s) encourages problem-solving (enumerating and evaluating the merits of two opposing views), empathy (learning why the author holds those view) and lateral thinking. For the content that explains a skill set different that yours, the ability to understand the degree of complexity in another discipline encourages teamwork (as you appreciate someone else’s skill set) and synthesis.
Ask for a critique – This might be the toughest one on the list. Ask two or three people (who you respect and would go to for advice) to critique your communication style, management style or leadership ability. Receiving the feedback graciously and openly displays adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning.
Find a way to help a coworker succeed – Look for a team member with a perpetually tough job or maybe one with a new, challenging assignment and figure out what you can do to help. Be a mentor, run interference so they can get the resources they need, or provide additional support from your department. Making an investment when you’re not promised anything in return shows teamwork, mentor mindset and empathy.
Look for a better way – Find an existing activity in the organization and look for a way to make it better. Can you more effectively engage employees, communicate more clearly with customers, or take steps out of a process (and keep the quality intact or maybe even improve it)? Improving an activity demonstrates creativity, adaptability and problem-solving.
Come in early and stay late and don’t waste time during the workday – This might seem like a no-brainer but putting in a full day shows work ethic.
Ask for extra, more challenging work – In addition to looking for a better way and putting in extra time, ask your boss for a challenging assignment or “the task nobody wants”. Executing on this extra work shows adaptability, problem-solving, and a commitment to lifelong learning.
Learn how to write code – It doesn’t matter what your job is, if you want to learn to think in a linear way (vertically) and to never leave any stone unturned, learn a programming language. Truly the software will only do what you tell it to do. If it’s wrong, you get immediate feedback in the form of erroneous results. If it’s incomplete, you have immediate feedback in the form of circumstances that aren’t addressed. It’s a shortcut to linear thinking, problem-solving, detail orientation, zooming out and zooming in, research, and creativity.
Learn how to draw – In contrast to the previous bullet point, if you want to learn to think laterally, learn to zoom out and zoom in (for a whole different reason) and be creative, take an art class.

When you’ve finished this exercise for your direct reports, schedule a one-on-one meeting, discuss the growth in skills you’d like to see, agree on the specific action items, timeline, check-in schedule and metrics for measuring progress. Encourage your direct reports to do the same thing with their team members.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 40 :: Governance :: Organizational Structure

October 4, 2020 Tags: functional structure, matrix structure, organizational structure, product team structure Mike Chirveno

There aren’t very many things in the course of growing a business that a business owner “falls” into – and there shouldn’t be. Each move should be calculated and deliberate. But if there’s one thing that happens, almost automatically, it’s the organizational structure.

If an electrician starts a new business, the first hire is most likely another electrician. But as the business grows, there might be an accountant, then a customer service rep, a procurement person, an IT person – you get the idea. Each of these people become the de facto head of a department and, “Viola” you have a traditional Functional Organizational Structure.

Most of the small businesses I know have this structure and most of the time it works well. And, I’m guessing the boss spends very little spare thought time considering another option.

This week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge isn’t an exhortation to change your organization’s current structure, but instead an encouragement to ponder the pluses and minuses inherent in that structure and to consider whether another structure might make it easier to execute your mission and push you closer to achieving your vision.

The Functional Organization Structure is easy and intuitive. There are three primary advantages to the functional structure –

Focus – The finance folks direct their attention to finance, the IT folks to IT, the production folks to production, etc. Unlike the solo practitioner who is salesperson, accountant, service provider and janitor, people who work in a functional structure can train all their attention to a single discipline. This, theoretically, produces superior work, allows for narrow specialization, and lessens the probability for dropping the ball in that discipline.
Collaboration – Having the software developers, or salespeople, or accountants together allows them to bounce ideas off one another, work in tandem on projects, and encourages mentorship.
Redundancy – Having multiple people working in the same discipline allows for cross training and for one person to have a working knowledge of the responsibilities of a co-worker. This mitigates the risk of a “single point of failure.” If one person gets hit by the proverbial “bus”, the work of the company goes on, uninterrupted.

However, the functional structure has a couple of built-in challenges –

Hand Offs – Every organization I work with struggles with hand offs. How does the new customer order flow seamlessly from sales to production to accounting to customer service? How do we make sure that nothing falls through the cracks? How do we make sure the customer service rep has complete visibility into all the information they need to service the customer just as soon as the order is taken? As the boss, if you want your functional structure to work, focus your attention on hand offs.
Alignment – As the organization grows, functional areas can sometimes take on a life of their own – especially if a particular discipline is preeminent in the value creation activities of the company. A software company might elevate the importance of brilliant software developers or a company in a very competitive commoditized industry might elevate the importance of a few star salespeople who can land large, lucrative clients and gain market share. These are good things. Excellent performers should be recognized. But the difficulties begin when some functional areas begin to wag the dog – when production becomes the enemy of the salespeople who procured the killer order that now must be fulfilled or advertising becomes the enemy of editorial who claim that taking advertising from a particular business will compromise the journalistic integrity of the enterprise. As the boss, it’s your job to keep every functional area on the same side of the equation.
Kingdom building – A possible ugly symptom of failed alignment – a bad apple in the management ranks can begin to kingdom build. Amassing an outsized staff or exercising undue influence in the organization is unhealthy. It’s your responsibility to build an idea meritocracy where the best ideas rule the day, not the overgrown influence of a single person or department. Kingdom builders have ceased to look out for the good of the organization and are focused on their own enrichment.

I want to look at two other organizational structure options for small and medium sized enterprises.

The Matrix Structure has the components of a functional structure, but project or product teams cut laterally across the functions. The idea is to eliminate handoff problems by creating a multi-discipline team that focuses on a project or product with representatives who act as the authority and proxy for the discipline they represent.

The first thing you probably noticed is the very thing that makes this structure challenging. People have two bosses – a straight line to a functional boss and a dotted line to a project or product manager. So who do they listen to when priorities are conflicting? Typically, employees give more allegiance to the boss that has the greatest ability to make their life better (does their performance review, gives them raises, affects their upward mobility in the company). This structure can work, but the mechanics of the dual reporting must be crystal clear to the functional boss, the project manager, and the employee.

The Product Team Structure works to remove the dual reporting problem.

In this structure, the employee truly reports to the product or project manager but keeps a dotted line relationship back to the functional area they represent. This dotted line relationship attaches them to resources for collaboration with others in the same discipline and maybe even provides some redundancy for their work, but they are tied to the project/product team. The project manager is their boss (does their review, gives them raises, affects their upward mobility in the company). Representatives of each discipline (depending on the size and complexity of the project, there might be multiple people representing each discipline) are true cross-discipline collaborators since their fortunes are more strongly tied to the success of the project than they are to the functional area they represent.

I’ve laid these out a bit more cut and dried than they have to be. Certainly, companies can morph them to work for their particular situation (for example, in either the matrix or product team structures, functional and project bosses could collaborate on employee reviews instead of an either/or situation).

So finally, let’s jump into this week’s exercise. For this one, I’d suggest you get your leadership team together and step through each of the structures and associated pros and cons. If you think changing structures makes sense, discuss what it would look like to make the change. Ask why? Do you want to change because you’re doing a sub-par job managing in the current structure? If so, why will a new structure make the managing better? If you’re convinced a new structure is desirable, explore the changes necessary to make the transition. How will the responsibilities of managers and supervisors change? How will the responsibilities of employees change? How will career paths change? How will processes change? How will the customer experience change? Will these changes build the company culture you’re trying to install/maintain? Will these changes make it easier to execute your mission? Are any technology changes necessary to support the new structure?

If in the comparison, you feel like you’ve got the optimal structure now, evaluate how well you’re capitalizing on the strengths of that structure and how well you’re dealing with the weaknesses. Identify corrective action items for anything that you need to fix or exploit and assign them to someone. Get it on your calendar to check back in a couple of weeks to track progress.

Since you’re a reader of the One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge, it’s unlikely you’re the CEO of global enterprise. That was never the target audience. So the chances that you need an organizational structure that spans multiple business units or multiple large geographies are slim. But, if you need to examine organizational structures that are more complex, hit me up at mchirveno@clearvision.consulting and we can explore some additional options.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 39 :: Strategic Planning :: Annual Plan

September 27, 2020 Tags: deliberate, strategic planning, strategy Mike Chirveno

Strategic Plans fail at an alarming rate. According to The Balanced Scorecard, 90% of businesses fail to execute their strategies successfully. According to onstrategyhq.com, 95% of employees don’t understand their organization’s strategic plan and 60% of companies don’t link strategy to budget. If those are the stats, why even engage in the Strategic Planning process at all?

First, there’s value in the process. General, and later President, Dwight Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Every plan, whether it’s for a military campaign or for running a donut shop, is built on informed theory and assumptions. But the minute those plans are implemented, they become vulnerable to forces outside our control. The enemy has more artillery than we anticipated. The muffin shop down the street lowers their prices. Does that mean it’s time to abandon our plan? That all our planning effort was wasted? No, it means just the opposite. If we exercised the discipline to plan thoroughly, we contemplated multiple actions and the anticipated outcomes for each. We chose one, or possibly a couple, of those actions and assembled the resources to execute it. But the real value in planning was that we analyzed all of the possible actions, all of the possible outcomes and all of the resources necessary to execute those actions. Now this knowledge is at our disposal. So, when reality collides with our plan and our initial choices don’t seem so wise, we already have a wealth of accumulated thought on how to readjust and redeploy our resources to still achieve our original objective.

Second, there’s value in the discipline. It is very easy to be caught in the tyranny of the urgent. Crises with employees, customers, vendors, equipment, and money can consume every waking work minute. Dedicating time for deliberate planning gets us off the hamster wheel of constant busyness. The discipline of –

thoughtfully examining our human resources – the people we have now and the people we’ll need in the future
carefully evaluating our value creation activities – supply chain, transformation activities, vendor performance
revisiting our financial management – liquidity, cash management, return on invested capital
carefully considering our market – customer problems we are solving, messaging, competitors
taking the temperature of our organization – culture, metrics

helps us see things clearly and truthfully with fresh eyes and more accurately plot a new course that moves us closer to our vision for the organization.

Finally, the biggest reason that Strategic Plans fail is lack of execution. Execution must be baked into the plan from the beginning and pursued fanatically through the entire organization as the plan is rolled out. A good Strategic Planning methodology leans heavily to the implementation side.

Let’s jump into this week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge. Clearly you won’t finish your thirty-minute exercise with a strategic plan, but that’s not the goal. The goal for this week’s challenge is to identify the people who will be involved, set up a time and decide on a process.

Good strategic plans require input from up and down the food chain. The larger the organization, the more difficult this becomes. As organizations grow, people at the top necessarily move away from important value creation activities and customer interactions. But it’s just those activities and interactions that must inform future strategic plans. The first order of business is making sure that all the information you need to get an accurate picture of the current state of your organization is in the room. Gathering that information and involving people in the strategic planning process who can accurately interpret and advocate for the stakeholder interests represented by that information is crucial.
Put in on the calendar and don’t let anything displace it. Find a time and make it happen. Depending on the size of your organization and how solidly your mission, vision and core values are defined, it might take a day, or it might take a week. If you’ve spent time to carefully define your mission and vision and are solid on your core values, you can jump straight into your strategic planning exercise. If those things are new to you, you’ll want to spend time on those first. For a frame of reference, when I’m doing this with a client ($2 – $20 million in revenue), we go at least 3 full days or 6 half days or a bit more depending on what we find as we define the current state of the organization. Once you’ve put it on the calendar make sure you protect the time both for yourself and for those working with you on the plan.
Decide on a process. There are a number of good strategic planning processes and tools out there. They range from the one-page variety to more complete and detailed frameworks. Remember, much of the value is in the discipline of the exercise, so no matter the framework, utilize fully, think deeply and create deliberately. Here are the things you want to look for in whatever framework you use.
- Get an accurate picture of the current state of your organization. One of the most prevalent and most damaging mistakes in a strategic planning exercise is failing to get an accurate picture of where you are now as an organization. You spend a lot of time on where you want to go but not nearly enough on where you are now. How can you make a map from here to there unless know your current location? Find a tool with powerful assessment tools.
- Create several fully-loaded future scenarios. With your knowledge of the current state of your organization, your assessment of your place in the external environment (with customers, competitors, regulators) and the efficacy of your products or services to successfully solve problems for current and potential customers, craft a number of strategic alternatives. These alternatives might solve a personnel problem, correct an operational deficiency, exploit a market opportunity, recreate an existing product or service or tech-enable your customer experience. Some alternatives might play well with others. Some might be bold and very different from what you’re doing now.
- Evaluate and choose the best opportunities. Your framework should give you tools to evaluate your alternatives in the light of financial return on investment (measuring the impact on shareholders in the long-term and in the short-term). You should also evaluate your alternatives considering employee experience, customer experience, regulatory compliance and, of course, in how much the alternative will push your organization closer to your vision. This part of the exercise should yield three, or at the most four, initiatives that you’ll be implementing over the next 12-18 months.
- Execute like crazy. Employ an implementation framework that lets you rollout the why and the what for the selected initiatives to every person in the organization. This framework must enable every team member to connect the dots between their job and the new initiatives. It must include accountability mechanisms and a scoring framework so that everyone knows how the organization is progressing toward its strategic initiatives.

If you want to safeguard the long-term health and viability of your organization, you need to do a regular Strategic Planning exercise. The discipline of critically evaluating your organization and making measured course corrections is the best insurance I know to keep you out of the trash heap of irrelevant, failed enterprises.

If you want more information on the strategic planning framework I use, contact me at mchirveno@clearvision.consulting.

The One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge :: Week 38 :: Operations :: Customer Onboarding

September 19, 2020 Tags: expectations, metrics, onboarding, responsibilities Mike Chirveno

There’s nothing more critical to a great customer experience than onboarding. Many times, we limit “onboarding” to something we do with a new employee, but every stakeholder in the organization should have an onboarding experience. Onboarding sets expectations, defines responsibilities and describes “winning”.

In this week’s One Year, Thirty Minute Challenge, we’re focusing on customer onboarding, but many of the outcomes and methodologies can be applied to other stakeholder groups.

Here’s why onboarding is so important. Have you ever received a movie recommendation from a trusted friend and, after watching the movie, realized you’d never get those two wasted hours of your life back (or in the case of Dances with Wolves, 4 hours)? It’s pretty disappointing. But why is it disappointing? Because the friend’s glowing recommendation created high expectations. In the absence of that recommendation, you might have still hated the movie, but you would have just added it to the list of movies you’ll never watch again. But now, you’re presented with confusion. You’ve had reliable recommendations from that friend in the past. What did you miss in the movie that your friend loved? How are you going to explain your disappointment to your friend? Will you ever be able to trust their recommendations in the future?

That all stemmed from faulty expectations created at the beginning of the interaction. We can have the same problem when we begin a relationship with a new customer. If we don’t successfully create correct expectations at the beginning of a relationship, the customer will create their own. Those will come from experience (the last time I hired a plumber, it took them an hour to replace my kitchen faucet), from hope (I would love it if the plumber spread a tarp in front of the sink before they began working on the drain) and from people who influence them (my friend hired a plumber and it cost them $300 to get their sink unclogged).

Let’s jump into this week’s exercise. We want to finish with a rock-solid customer onboarding framework. Depending on your product or service, this could be very simple or a bit complex. You can do this one solo or invite some trusted team members who are familiar with the flow of work from initial customer contact to delivery. We’re going to focus our attention on three things – expectations, responsibilities and metrics.

Before I jump into the steps below, let me quickly say that I’m aware we’re talking about a mix of communication, some before the sale and some after the sale. I realize that in some pre-sale messaging, you’re selling a feeling or experience (someone buying insurance is buying peace of mind in the midst of an unfortunate circumstance, not a policy). The bulk of the ideas below are to create clarity of expectation, responsibility and metrics. You decide where to deliver them in your messaging based on your product, service and desired delivery experience.

Expectations

Succinctly describe what product or service the customer is buying (A great meal at a great price, the most sophisticated timepiece you’ll ever own, you’ll never know your car was wrecked).
Give clear direction to the first step in the discovery or purchase process (Visit our showroom at 123 Main Street, contact one of our friendly customer service representatives at 555-555-5555, click here to schedule an initial appointment).
Explain the steps in which you create value for the customer (It all starts with a free health assessment, we’ll email you the results of the assessment along with our recommendations, in three days we’ll contact you and get your decision on which weight loss program is best for you, we’ll kick off your exercise and diet plan, and by week 4, you’ll be down 10 pounds).
Explain what interactions will look like (you’ll never be stuck in voicemail jail – a real person will always answer the phone, you’ll be able to manage your account from anywhere on our award-winning mobile app, you’ll have unlimited support via email with a 4 hour guaranteed response time).
If your product or service has inherent uncertainty, explain the path from uncertainty to certainty (When our technician arrives to examine your appliance, you’ll get a full explanation of the problem and a complete estimate of what it will cost to fix it. We’ll get your OK before we proceed with any repair. And when it’s fixed, the parts and labor are guaranteed for one year).
Explain the customer’s financial responsibility ($99/month for the first six months, then $129/month for 33 months, there’s a $400 administrative fee on top of the price of the car). If you want to make customers extremely unhappy, bury some previously undisclosed cost in the fine print.
Explain what will happen if something goes wrong (our workmanship is guaranteed for 10 years – if your roof leaks, we’ll fix it at no charge to you, if this isn’t the best snow-cone you’ve ever eaten – your money back, if you don’t like the like the paint color you’ve chosen with our patented color match system, we’ll repaint your room for free).

Responsibilities

One of the key parts of customer onboarding is explaining the customer’s role in the delivery of your product or service.

Define deadlines (For your policy to be in effect by 10/11/2020, we need your driver’s license number and the VIN from your car by 9/30/2020, to terminate your lease please notify us 180 days before the renewal date).
Explain their involvement. The number of used treadmills, ellipticals and Chuck Norris Total Gyms on Craigslist owned by people who are still overweight are a testament to the number of customers who don’t embrace their responsibility during onboarding. Customers buy, what appear to be, solutions to a problem they are experiencing. Clearly lay out the steps they must take for that problem to be resolved. And explain the how, not just the what.
Provide engagement tools. Think about the number of companion apps you have for the products or services you consume. I can lower my thermostat, manage my robot vacuum, change the payment method for my car insurance, and get a reminder when my Home Depot credit card bill is due on my phone. Each time you make it easier to interact with your product or service, you help the customer derive more value from the product or service, make it easier for the customer to fulfill his or her responsibilities, and ultimately solve their problem. Engagement tools don’t have to be as sophisticated as a mobile app. I recently got a bid from a roofing company to replace my roof. Part of their proposal was a checklist for me to follow before they began work on my home. The checklist explained not only what I needed to do, but why it would aid them in quickly solving my problem (getting a new roof on my house in the minimum amount of time and with the least amount of expense).
Give examples of customers who have successfully engaged the product or service and achieved the desired results. These examples inspire, inform, and help customers connect the dots between what the product does and what they must do.

Metrics

Everyone wants to “win” with their purchase. In the onboarding experience, we need to accurately identify winning for them.

Help customers measure leading indicators, not just trailing indicators. If they buy exercise equipment, “winning” is working out 20 minutes a day and cutting their caloric intake, not losing 20 pounds. If they do the former, they will get the latter.
Help customers attach greater meaning to their purchases. The financial planner’s 1% annual management fee isn’t a cost, it’s an investment in someone who devotes their professional life to helping clients secure their financial future and the financial future of the client’s family.
Help customers attach greater reach to their purchases. The business coaching purchased by the CEO doesn’t just benefit the executive. All who work for that executive benefit as he or she becomes a more effective leader and pushes what he or she learns down through the organization. And, by increasing the organization’s effectiveness and efficiency, shareholders benefit.

When expectations, responsibilities, and metrics are clearly defined for a new customer, everyone involved in the equation knows how to behave. If the company fails to deliver on the expectations, they can quickly make it right. If the customer fails to live up to their obligations, the company can jump in with a bit of accountability and encouragement to get the relationship back on track. When both parties agree on what “winning” looks like, they can track it with reporting and reinforce it with messaging.