Are your Priorities Reflected on your calendar?

It has been said that your email inbox is nothing more than the well-organized priorities of everyone else. Is that also true of your calendar? Would it be apparent to a stranger looking at your calendar what your highest priorities might be?

In my work with even the greatest clients, I have learned that what a leader might say is important to them and what they actually do, are sometimes not in coordination. It follows that what we value most requires the time to achieve. Whether it is being a great Dad, or a great business owner plotting a positive trajectory for the business and all that work in it, the one absolute is that it will not happen unless the time, effort and focus are applied in direct relationship to the goal’s priority. It is extremely difficult in today’s ridiculously paced business world to try to get everything accomplished. Therefore, we must choose. Choose sometimes to not make that meeting, attend that lunch, or answer that call until our highest priorities are met.

This week, write down your three highest personal and professional priorities. List them in importance and apply a reasonable amount of time to achieve your objectives. Now go to your weekly calendar and place the necessary appointments with yourself that need to be as sacred as an important client meeting. If something comes up – as it always has and always will – simply move the meeting with you instead of missing it. When we miss consistently committing the time to our goals – plainly put – we miss achieving our goals. Missing our goals creates self-doubt and an unwillingness to establish new ones. This is what happens to the average executive – be more than average this year!

Have a productive week!

Coach Kirby

Cashflow

As we examine the root of poor cash flow – it comes down to four key areas; payables, receivables, inventory and financing. It is the administration of these areas that leads to a cash-gap – which will ultimately create a cash-flow challenge. The cash-gap is the time between paying for your goods/services and collecting for them. In the next four weeks we are going to examine each of these four areas in detail. Our objective will be to suggest some possible improvements so that it can trigger a strategy that you can immediately implement into your business. This week, let’s start with our payables.

1. Consolidate vendors for better pricing. Just as we compete with many other companies that offer the same products and services, so too there are multiple vendors that can fulfill our needs. We can either delve into a process of cost comparison, or we can look at current vendors and consolidate our ordering around the one with the best value and terms.

2. Increase the credit taken from suppliers and extend terms. Go back to every vendor with whom you do work and negotiate for better terms or extended credit. Those with the most lenient terms deserve your loyalty.

3. Make prompt payments only when worthwhile discounts apply. Push your pay cycle to the limits of your extended credit unless a vendor makes early payment options worth your while.

4. Pay your bills promptly to demonstrate your value as a new customer. After you build a history of payment with new vendors, negotiate extended payment terms – a supplier will often give a good customer 30 to 90 day terms.

5. Keep overheads to a minimum. It is critical to minimize fixed costs inside of your business. Before purchasing something, set increased sales goals to justify and fund the expense.

6. Go to twice-monthly payroll – 24 periods. This one can become unpopular unless it is well handled. Employees must understand the mission or the enterprise and be excited to be part of the team. For sales employees move towards paying commissions and bonuses in the 2nd pay-period in the month following the activity. It is even better to pay on collections instead of billing. This incents the salesperson to be vigilant about collecting and sharing the burden of selling only to those clients that are either Cash-In-Advance or credit worthy.

If you have any questions about how to implement these strategies, I welcome your call. Next week, we will make some suggestions in the area of receivables. Until then, have a tremendous week!

Pesky Persistence – Part 2

Is your plan still correct? If not, update the plan. Is your goal still correct? If not, update or abandon your goal. There’s no honor in clinging to a goal that no longer inspires you. Persistence is not stubbornness.

This was a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn. I had always believed one should never give up, that once you set a goal, you should hang on to the bitter end. The captain goes down with the ship and all that. If I ever failed to finish a project I started, I’d feel very guilty about it.

Eventually I figured out that this is just nonsense.

If you’re growing at all as a human being, then you’re going to be a different person each year than you were the previous year. And if you consciously pursue personal development, then the changes will often be dramatic and rapid. You can’t guarantee that the goals you set today will still be ones you’ll want to achieve a year from now.

The value of persistence comes not from stubbornly clinging to the past. It comes from a vision of the future that’s so compelling you would give almost anything to make it real.

Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision.

Pesky Persistence – Part 1

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
- Calvin Coolidge

Persistence is the fifth and final pillar of self-discipline.

What Is Persistence?

Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings. You press on even when you feel like quitting.

When you work on any big goal, your motivation will wax and wane like waves hitting the shore. Sometimes you’ll feel motivated; sometimes you won’t. But it’s not your motivation that will produce results — it’s your action. Persistence allows you to keep taking action even when you don’t feel motivated to do so, and therefore you keep accumulating results.

Persistence will ultimately provide its own motivation. If you simply keep taking action, you’ll eventually get results, and results can be very motivating. For example, you may become a lot more enthusiastic about dieting and exercising once you’ve lost those first 10 pounds and feel your clothes fitting more loosely.

When to Give Up

Should you always persist and never give up? Certainly not. Sometimes giving up is clearly the best option.

Have you ever heard of a company called Traf-O-Data? What about Microsoft? Both companies were started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Traf-O-Data was the first company they started, back in 1972. Gates and Allen ran it for several years before throwing in the towel. They gave up. Of course they did a little better with Microsoft.

If they hadn’t given up on Traf-O-Data, then we wouldn’t have such rich collections of Microsoft and Bill Gates jokes today.

So how do you know when to press on vs. when to give up? We will deal with that question next week! Until then…Be Persistent!

Major in the Minor

It is better to be the best in a niche than just a face in a busy crowd. I met a realtor who markets himself as an expert in the disposition of real estate for those in divorces. Why would he do this? 1) There are 5,936 Realtors in San Antonio, 2) The divorce statistics in America are 45%-50% of first marriages end in divorce, 60%-67% of 2nd marriages and 70% – 73% of third marriages all end in divorce, 3) This is a unique situation with particular complications that most realtors will not want to deal with – he did his research and became an expert, 2) He represents both parties – so each needs a new place to live.

In your business – what is your specialty – you can have more than one. Be a specialist – market yourself heavily to that vertical and watch magic happen!

Be the best!

To your success!

Vanilla is Awesome – unless you are a small business!

According to the International Ice Cream Association in Washington, D.C Vanilla is still the runaway most favored ice cream flavor in the United States with a 29% approval rating vs. number two, Chocolate, with 8.9%. Just to finish the thought – because I know you are dying to know – butter pecan ekes out a third place victory over Strawberry.

McDonald’s and Pepsi can serve vanilla. So can Charles Schwab, a Presidential candidate or General Motors – but can a small business? My short answer is “No” unless you have the type of money to market the “All-things-to-all-folks” message.

For us little guys, however, we can’t afford to be vanilla and be a break out success. We must be strikingly relevant in unique and contextual ways. If a business has competitors that do precisely the same thing – and we all have a bunch of them – then all of us fade into the background. Our quest, then, is to either out-spend them or out-market them. Since most of us will raise our hand for the latter strategy, this will force us to do a little homework.

Why do our loyal customers choose us?
What do they think makes us unique?
When they refer us – what are our qualities, or the things that we do, that they tell their friends about?
What are the most important benefits that they seek when they choose a vendor in our space?

Once we understand this – our marketing must scream this messaging – in our ads, our postcards, our invoices, our phone work, our networking and, of course, our websites.

Without uniqueness, we are just another scoop of vanilla in a 31 Vanilla Flavors display case. You know we are there – we are just hard to find! So as the customer strolls along the freezers with their nose up against the glass, they can’t see a difference between the vanilla offerings except for the price per scoop next to each tub. We are then subject to the only quality we have given the opportunity to compare against. Nobody wins in a price war.

Stand out or stand down!

To your success!