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While working on some new content for my SME leadership development program, over the weekend it occurred to me that every single one of my current clients has a common challenge. I just hadn’t seen it quite as clearly as I do now. Every one of you is trying to hand the baton of running the business, or elements of the business, to others.
For some of you it is about a complete transition of power, like a Jedi ...
Continue Reading →The media was focussing on the Prison service over the weekend but something, in particular, caught my eye. The Prisons Minister outlined plans to make Prison Guards responsible for what almost sounded like mentoring and counselling of prisoners. My first reaction was a predictable one. How on earth can you have someone who one minute is locking doors and administering discipline and then a warm and fluffy counsellor, pointing hardened criminals to a better way of being? This sounded like ...
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When I worked at Tesco my boss (the Director Of Audit) was involved with a Board level project to re-design the Annual Report and Accounts document. I was asked to take a look at how the commentary in our report stacked up with what our principal competitors said.
This involved trawling through the annual reports of Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrison, Safeway and Marks and Spencer. One of ...
Continue Reading →Over the weekend I was going through an old portable disk drive from my time in the corporate world. I came across a letter I wrote to my new management team, just after the company had undergone a major restructure. I had to completely restructure my management team and this included a number of redundancies.
As you can imagine this was a challenging time. Once the decision had been made I had to deal with the exiting of three of the ...
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Lots of businesses in the area seem to be very busy at the moment. Some companies have full order books and are actually struggling to keep up with customer enquiries. This is cause for celebration (providing of course that your margins mean this is profitable business).
This type of activity is what I like to call ‘hamster wheel’ work. It is the core activity or the ‘quote to invoice’ process that every business has in some form or another. Without this ...
Continue Reading →Most of you will have had experience of hard selling at some point in your life and will know how it actually puts you off making a purchase. Even if you do buy you are unlikely to become a regular. We can sniff out a sales pitch from a hundred yards so the historic “foot in the door” approach just doesn’t work. Sales is about professionally helping the right people to buy your products and services. Start thinking like that and see what ...
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I have loved bonfire night since I was a kid and we always make a big deal of it in my family. Of course, there is a bit (O.K. a lot) of a competition between my brothers and I to see who can source the “biggest” firework for our family event and until recently I relied on the same ...
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“You get the people you deserve!” Brad Sugars – ActionCOACH Founder
Next time you are faced with the challenge of recruiting good people ask yourself:
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This week I had an interesting discussion with a client on the subject of recruitment. He is mopping up the aftermath of parting company with a poor performing manager.
The manager’s inabilities have been devastating on customer service, the morale of the team and ultimately the profitability of the business division he was running and it has left the business owner terrified of getting in another sub-standard manager. Of course anyone who has had to recruit a lot of ...
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In 1954 Roger Bannister finally achieved the seemingly impossible and ran a sub four minute mile (3m 59.4s). Since then the sub four minute mile has become the standard of all professional middle distance runners and the record has been lowered by almost 17 seconds.
Thinking about your business, what are your own “four minute miles”?
What are the self imposed ceilings on the performance ...
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