Getting more done with less stress, effort and frustration is what many business owners wish for.

At a recent presentation, Steve Hoare (Management by Reflection), explained why, if we want to grow a business, have a home life and enjoy what we do with the minimum of stress, it is important to spend our time doing the things we are good and learn to appreciate the contributions made by people who have different strengths to us.

To illustrate the point, members of the group were asked to put themselves into one of three groups that they most identified with while acknowledging that there may be some crossover.

The Blue Group identified most with the words:

Thinking, creative, problem solving, strategic, discerning, self starting, single minded.

The Yellow Group with:

Inclusive, mature, communicator, diplomatic, co-operative, enthusiastic

The Red Group with:

Challenging, dynamic, action, perfectionist, reliable, efficient, conscientious

Each group was given the same task and assigned an observer.

The idea was to show what happens when people with the same strengths work on a task, compared to when people with a whole range of strengths work together.

The result is that people adapt to fill the gaps but usually feel uncomfortable in these roles. This is OK for a short while (our experiment only lasted for ten minutes) but the longer it continues, the more the cracks begin to show.

The ensuing discussion focused on the importance of not seeing the absence of a particular type of behaviour as a weakness but on playing to people’s strengths.

It is equally important not to let the ‘weakness’ become a crutch or an excuse, e.g. “What do you expect? I’m this type of person not that type.”

In terms of identifying the people most likely to produce the best results we often look for skills first followed by personality but profiling the behaviours needed to complement a team can often improve the way everyone works and reduce the stress, frustration and effort while getting much more done in less time.

There is a huge amount of research that shows that we are really poor judges of others and relying on ‘gut instinct’ is the worst possible way to select people to work with.

When employing people, Steve recommends the Belbin Team Role profiling tool be used along with a suite of other tools for assessing personality and aptitude. Many tools on the market have no scientific validity so it is best to check this out and use an accredited practitioner to analyse the results.

Any double about the value / cost ratio will be quickly dispelled by a calculation of what it costs to make the wrong decision!

If you don’t understand people you don’t understand business

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When Richard Burton, (RIP) was a young actor and was cast in the role of spear carrier in crowd scenes, his presence was so compelling that he stole the limelight from the actor playing the king.

How do you make this kind of impact in a crowd?

More importantly, in business, when you meet people for the first time, how do you get make sure  they take notice of you, trust you, want to know you and recommend you to their friends?

There are all sorts of techniques that help people change their self-beliefs in order to become more confident, there are voice coaches, body language specialists, NLP trainers, hypnotherapists and more.

However,

People don’t see your beliefs.

They don’t know what you’re thinking.

They’re not aware of your emotions.

The only thing they notice is your BEHAVIOUR

For thousands of years, actors have been making us believe in them by displaying the BEHAVIOUR of the kind of person they want to portray.

What happens in their personal lives doesn’t affect their performance.

They are often insecure as individuals but still deliver great, believable performances.

They often do it eight times a week for hundreds of weeks with great consistency.

They can portray characters that are totally unlike themselves with enormous conviction.

How does this help an ordinary person who wishes to create an impact?

Easy! We can copy what the best actors do.

Five Easy Steps on How to Make an Impact

1. Define the role you want to play, e.g. charismatic leader, honest salesperson, trustworthy consultant, creative designer, useful team player

2. Define the qualities a person in this role displays, e.g. charm, authority, consideration, tact, etc.

3. Take each quality and work out what you need DO with your body to show those qualities, e.g to display consideration you may need to show that you are actively listening. What does a person who is actively listening DO? They make eye contact, lean forward and nod.
   Repeat this process for each quality until you know exactly how to DO what a person in your chosen role would DO.

4. Practice. Practice until you become your behaviour, until its stops being an act and becomes authentically you. (Physical actions trigger emotions and create beliefs)

5. Be the best version of yourself that you want to be – consistently.

Do – Be – Have

DO the things you need to do to BE the person you want to be and the things you want to HAVE will  follow.

Burton played 136 performances of Hamlet over 18 weeks. The production grossed $1,250,000. It was the highest-grossing and almost certainly the most profitable presentation of the play in the USA, if not the world.

He was born the 12th child in a family of 13 children in a mining village in Wales. His mother died when he was 2 years old.

“I find it ludicrous, learning some idiot’s lines in the small hours of the night so I can stay a millionaire”. Burton, 1972

This post is inspired by a training session with Mark Doyle of Fecund

Fecund provides measurable bespoke training for businesses as well as open Leadership and Personal Development Programmes.  For more information contact Mark Doyle at mark@fecund.co.uk

Marcus Orlovsky

Imagine the excitement of buying, selling and racing cars at aged 19 and making enough money  to not only pay for yourself to go to university but to buy a home for your mother and grandmother.

Imagine starting work at one of the world’s biggest firms of accountants and owning two Ferraris and therefore not toeing the corporate line and getting promoted again and again because, instead of telling your bosses what they wanted to hear you told them what they needed to hear.

Imagine owning a string of antique shops while still working in the corporate world.

Imagine borrowing £7,000,000,000 (that’s £7 billion) and re-building vast areas of London, including Broadgate, Ludgate Circus and Stockley Park.

Imagine owning Tiger, Tiger the famous bar and club in London’s West End, a software house (PLT) and starting Lazy Town, the internationally renowned children’s entertainment and lifestyle brand that has a direct and measurable effect on the health of children.

(Marcus has asked me to point out that in most of these projects he was part of team and didn’t do it on his own)

What kind of a man manages all of these achievements?

Imagine having a father who was so violent he beat your mother and threw you down a set of concrete stairs when you were just five years old.

Imagine being taken into care when your father went to prison and your mother was sectioned and incarcerated in a mental health institution.

Imagine working to get yourself through university and caring for a mentally ill mother who committed suicide one day when you forgot to supervise her medication.

Imagine losing £2.25 million when your stock crashed and you chose to try and help others recover their investment, instead of taking the easy way out and selling it while you could.

Imagine raising and giving away millions and bringing all of your remarkable talents and qualities to bear on challenging an education system that consistently fails those who don’t conform and helping to change the curriculum, teaching styles and the physical environment.

Is it any wonder that Marcus Orlovsky left an impression on his audience that most of them will never forget?

Before divulging his own background, Marcus got the audience thinking about why it is better to do the right thing than the done thing. He used examples from the food industry, the oil industry, education and others where decisions that caused misery could have been avoided if there had been stronger leaders instead of managers, willing to speak up.

He asked us to name the CEOs of the world’s five largest companies. We couldn’t.

He reminded us that feelings are more powerful than knowing, talking and thinking and asked us what we would all wish for any new born child.

The answers, universally, are to create unique human beings who show happiness, helpfulness, kindness, creativity, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, resourcefulness and love. And yet their formative years are spent learning facts and they are judged, often for the biggest part of their lives, on how well they remember lessons in maths, history and science and hardly ever on the things we all wish for them to achieve.  Worse than that, their dreams are often dashed and they are forced into pigeonholes and punished for displaying  behaviour that doesn’t conform to the accepted norms of our educational systems.

And yet there are remarkable examples of people, like Marcus himself, who don’t fit the system and succeed against all the odds. Of the 200,000 iphone apps, many were invented by under 14 year olds and 40% of employees in Google have autism.

Marcus now spends his time at the educational consultancy http://www.bryanstonsquare.com/ bringing his prodigious talents to bear on improving education and helping to build an environment that gives children a chance to make their dreams come true.

The reaction from many members of the audience was that Marcus caused them to re-think their definitions of success and question their own assumptions

He left us with this thought: “If it has never been done before, there are no experts” with the subtext “So dare to dream and give it a shot!”

If you would like to find out more, sign up for the Bryanston Square newsletter and follow them on Twitter @BryanstonSquare

I’d love to hear your views so please leave a comment below …..

David F Smallman, Managing Partner of Pathfinder Team Consulting,  invited participants in The Inspired Group to ask him any question about business. These are his answers:

Q. What advice would you give someone in their first year of business?

A. Don’t lose the passion. Ever. Not even in your 42^nd year.

Q. Is it wise to use an untested business model?

A.  No. Get it tested.

Q. How do you make sure a new idea doesn’t get stolen before you develop it?

A. Keep it out of the public domain until you’ve had it patented, trade marked etc. Non disclosure agreements are hard to enforce.

Q. What is the best way to price your services?

A. Price the project according to the value to the customer. This may mean that you charge two very different prices for the same work. Charge 25% up front, then two further instalments of 25% and 50%. In over 40 years in business we’ve never had a significant bad debt or had to waste time chasing money.  Cash flow is vitally important and this way, your expenses are covered before you start.

Q. What is the single most important ingredient in creating a successful business?

A. Passion (as above)

Q. What one channel would you choose to market a business?

A. It depends on the type of business:
Manufacturing – distribution / sub contractors
Service Provision – figure out how your customers/clients like to buy and meet them there
Accounting / Financial services – traditional routes are still working

Q. What will the future economic power of the UK be like?
A. Look out for a debate between David and Phil Jones of Excitant Ltd on this topic. David recommends reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis.

Q. If the three essentials of business are producing the product or service, managing and marketing, what time should a business owner spend on each.
A. In a 60 hour week (which most business owners admit to working)

Marketing 55%  – 33 hours
Making       35% – 21 hours
Managing   10% -   6 hours
Anyone spending more than 6 hours managing a business needs to streamline or outsource and ask themselves if they using this as an excuse not to do the marketing.

Similarly, when marketing, use the same equation:
Existing customers 55%
Short term prospects 33%
Long term prospects 10%

Q. Should we strive to continuously make our services or products better?
A. Excellence can sometimes be the death of a business. Quality is what is good enough to satisfy the customer.

Q. Is social media providing businesses that use it with an advantage?
A.  Many big businesses just haven’t got it yet but many smaller businesses are using Social Media to great advantage so it gives them an edge in engaging, listening and providing what customers want.

There are more questions and answers on the LinkedIn discussion http://lnkd.in/Hw4QVb

Questions that David didn’t have time to answer:

Is there a particular hobby or pastime  associated with business success?
Is there a difference between leadership and management? (See http://lnkd.in/xMdyjG for this discussion)
What is the best strategy to cope with a business failure?

Do you know ‘why’ you do what you do in business?

Most people know ‘what’ they do in business (at least I hope so)
Fewer people know ‘how’ they do it. (Most really great sales people don’t know ‘how’ – they just know they do)
Even fewer know ‘why’ they do it, yet this is the most powerful.
Why? Why is that the case?

Because, when we understand our own motivation, when we know that we believe 100% in what we do, it’s easy for other people to connect with us, engage with us and makes selling a product or service that much easier.

Marketing has always been about getting people emotionally involved with a brand, product or service but however big your budget is, old style marketing is finding it harder and harder to make an impression. Everyone is sceptical, everyone is cynical. Advertising and PR only go so far now because consumers now expect exceptional products, value and service but they also want to be involved, engaged and listened to. They are no longer passive receivers of marketing messages, they are active in finding what they need and that includes wanting to feel connected to the brand.

We’ve always been curious about the people behind exceptional brands

We like to know their stories, what makes them tick, their views and values but now it’s not just the exceptional brands that get this attention. We want to know this about pretty much everyone we do business with.

Take Sean:

Sean’s company produces great video for business

“So do thousands of others. So what?”

Sean is *passionate* about what he does.

“Yawn. So is everybody else (or at least they say they are). So what?”

Sean’s company uses cutting edge technology to produce high quality products at very reasonable costs.

“So do many others. So what?”

Sean jumps out of bed in the morning for sheer excitement, adventure and a sense of wonderment. He believes there is nothing quite so fulfilling as working with others to transform an idea into a vibrant, profit generating business – a business where the customers, employees and investors all share in the benefits.

When you meet Sean, he doesn’t tell you this last bit of course but as you talk to him you soon start to feel his enthusiasm, his excitement, his wonder. You quickly get a sense of his values, his integrity, his sincerity. If you share these attributes you’ll be very comfortable with Sean. Even if you don’t need his services you’ll always be happy to see him and get to know him better and before long you’ll be talking about him and introducing him to people you know.

Why? Because Sean is 100% comfortable with who he is, what he does and why he does it. He’s not putting on an act. He’s not afraid of being found out. He’s not holding a position. He’s allowing you to see the real person. He’s exposing the real ‘him’ and because he’s relaxed about this, you will be too. Perhaps most importantly, Sean is not about to start pretending to be something he’s not, just to get a contract or please a customer.

The advent of the ‘social human’

As I was writing this I got an update from a favourite blogger, Jon Holloway*, who says: (my paraphrasing) We are all now looking for more from the brands we engage with, we want to know more about the reason they exist, who the people are and why we should care. We also want to know how we can get involved.

Jon explains that as brands are trying to move from push to pull marketing, consumers have moved to yet another stage and are now looking for a ‘value exchange’.

The advent of the ‘social human’ (Jon’s phrase) via the explosion of the use of social networking in marketing makes this easy for people like Sean who are happy to be their brand and to be themselves at the same time but it makes it hard for anyone to hide behind a brand. It’s not enough to be the ‘face’ of a brand, we need to be the heart and soul of our brands too.

For some of us, this may involve an uncomfortable amount of navel gazing.

The Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself”, was apparently inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi and has been attributed to many Greek philosophers and sages.
If mankind has been struggling with this concept since the days of Plato and Socrates it is hardly surprising that the question “Why do you do what you do in business?” proved a hard one to answer.

There are some fascinating insights amongst the 70 or so comments on the LinkedIn discussion http://lnkd.in/i4iGxV.

There are many tools and techniques that help us to get to grips with who we are and why we do what we do. At our April TIG event, we heard about Motivational Maps supplied by Nick Ratcliffe of http://www.partnersinmotivation.co.uk ; Myers Brigs personality questionnaires from Sue Parsons of http://www.vamonostraining.co.uk/ and Belbin Team Roles, Transactional Analysis, NLP and more from Steve Hoare of http://www.legacyinterim.co.uk/. Steve’s blog is http://mbrfan.wordpress.com/
All of these people are experts in helping people to discover why they do what they do and how to apply this knowledge to business and would be happy to answer any questions.

*Jon Holloway blogs for http://www.bethehurricane.com/ and is on Twitter as @socialvation You can read the full text of what Jon says here: http://www.bethehurricane.com/2011/04/forget-push-pull-marketing-exchange/

Would you like to share your ‘why’ or add to the discussion? We’d be delighted to hear from you either here on the LinkedIn group.

Why so many businesses don’t grow

Lots of people have great ideas for businesses.

Lots of people start new businesses.

Not many grow them into thriving enterprises that provide employment and contribute significantly to the economy of the country.

Too many people spend all their time working IN their business and hardly any time at all working ON it.

There’s nothing wrong with “lifestyle” businesses if that’s what you set out to achieve but so many people set out with different aims: to build a business that can exist without them; that can be sold; that won’t die when they retire; that will provide them with a pension; that provides other people with a good living; that is more than simply swapping their time for money.

A good idea is not enough to grow a great company.

Being great at what you do does not mean that you have a great company.

Companies consist of three main things:

Product                   +      Process     +     People

Many businesses have a good product and great people but it’s the processes that allow them to grow.

This means that any job does not rely on just one person being able to do it.

Invest as much in the processes as you do in the product and the people.

Under funding is what keeps most businesses small.

Too many new businesses think they have to compete on price in order to get into the market. This is only true if everything else you have to offer is unremarkable and will only work if your whole business model is based on very small margins.

Keeping control of cash flow and understanding management accounts is probably THE most important factor in growing a business.

Money allows you to take the right business decisions at the right time but often the biggest decision that needs to be made isn’t a financial one but “Are you the right person to run your business?” Just because you started it doesn’t mean you have the right skills or temperament to do the day to day work of managing it.

If your aim is to grow a business rather than create a job for yourself, assuming that you already have a great idea,  these are the top tips to make it work:

1. Get enough capital before you start. Working just to cover your own wages is not a business.
2. Estimate what you need and how long it will take to turn a profit and then double it.
3. Don’t do any job that you can hire someone else to do better or quicker.
4. Understand the finances of how a business works. It’s the most important job.
5. Invest in processes so that no one person is irreplaceable – especially you.

Share below your experiences of growing a business – I’d love to hear them ….

What does success mean to you?

We live in a culture that is pretty much obsessed with success, and there’s a lot of advice on how to be successful – how to set the parameters of success and how to model the behaviours of successful people.

John Turner, philosopher and visiting Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire Business School led a discussion on The Philosophy of Success

Phil Begnett | Web Video Producer filmed and produced two short videos taken from the nights excellent seminar.

As the evening was very “Interactive” with the audience, the video had to be shot from the “side” of the stage ….

Funky Philosophy – Activity based Philosophy

Deep Networking – The antidote for speed networking!

This post is related to a previous post “What does Success Mean to You?” and to a lively discussion on LinkedIn with 71 comments! http://lnkd.in/Htuywx If you’d like to join in, leave your comments here or on the LinkedIn discussion!

I heard today that Clive Gott died suddenly last night of a heart attack.

I’m stunned that such a larger than life man has just gone from our lives.

Clive was instrumental  in me starting The Inspired Group (although he would always deny it) and his influence over the last six years has been at the root of what it has become.

I and thousands of other people whose lives he touched will miss him a lot.

RIP Clive. x

http://www.clivegott.com/

Clive’s Facebook page is where lots of people are leaving a tribute. If he touched your life you might want to add yours http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=563837159

This is my tribute to him:

Clive was an impressive guy.

His achievements were very impressive and his performances as a professional speaker were always impressive.

However, there are quite a few people out there who have done similar things and speak about them very well. What makes Clive different is that he walked his talk, not just for the sake of being able to tell a good story but in everything he did and said even when it got really uncomfortable.

There are lots of people who let people believe that they agree with things they don’t believe in or just keep quiet rather than rock the boat but that wasn’t Clive’s style.

If you asked for his opinion you’d get it (and he’d tell you that it was HIS opinion, HIS truth and no-one else’s)

If you said something he disagreed with, he’d tell you why. He was not a political animal, he was  a genuine one. He didn’t play power games and this meant that some people didn’t like him.

In the six years I knew him, I saw him interact with a wide variety of people. Some were charmed, some were changed and some were challenged – no one was untouched and this  was his strength and his value in other people’s lives.

There was no condescension, holier than thou message in Clive’s talks. He exposed himself as a fallible human being who made mistakes and was willing to make changes and was all the more inspiring because of it. He invited people to hold a mirror up to themselves and if they didn’t like what they saw, to have the courage to make changes for themselves. This is why Clive will be talked about for a long time to come and why his impact on thousands of people will be a lasting one.

If ever a man knew how to do the right thing rather than the done thing it was Clive.

If any of us can look back our lives and be as proud of our achievements as Clive can be of his we’ll know we’ve lived well.

I’ll miss him.

A recent meeting on changes in buyer behaviour and marketing styles raised more questions than it answered so here are a few thoughts to help clarify things:

We used to say, find out where your potential buyers hang out and go talk to them, advertise to them, socialise with them, network with them, get in their face wherever they are.

In recent times consumers simply don’t accept that any more. They have become virtually immune to most forms of advertising and there are so many marketing messages vying for attention that it is difficult for any but the truly exceptional to be noticed.

And yet, buyers still buy.

The big difference in buyer behaviour is that they seek out suppliers, not the other way round. This means that, as businesses, we need to be found when our potential clients come looking for us.

So, the big question is: If you were searching for your product or service, where would you go to find it?

It might be Google, it might be a business directory, it might be a group of friends or a peer group.

We all know the power of Google and the importance of having a web site that shows up in Google searches but increasingly, people are turning to their social networks to ask for word-of-mouth recommendations – and the giant of the social networks is Facebook with over 500 million users.

In the background of this organic change in consumer behaviour is the change that is being driven by the big battle between Google and Microsoft.

In a nutshell, Microsoft wants a piece of Google’s market share of the search advertising revenue stream. It launched its own search engine (Bing) and bought out Yahoo search and then did a deal with Facebook that gives Bing huge amounts of information to draw on in searches.

Every time anyone clicks a Facebook ‘like’ button (now used on more than 2 million sites) the information creates Facebook’s Instant Personalisation which gives each Facebook user a unique experience.

This in turn feeds Bing which means that it can provide what is called a ‘social search’ that shows the searcher what their Facebook friends have liked in relation to that search. In effect, Facebook, in conjunction with Bing, is now challenging Google as the main driver of traffic to websites.

Just today (17th Feb 2011) Google has announced a subscription service allowing publishers to charge for content from which Google will earn a fee.)

Do you have a Facebook ‘like’ button anywhere on the web?

Is your website optimised for searches, including video content?

How else can a business be ‘found’

Google ad words and Facebook ads are both cheap and easy to use but Facebook has the edge on targeting ads.The only real answer is to experiment and see what works for your business.

YouTube and Twitter are also huge influencers on how people find and visit websites, drawn in because they were actively searching for something or were sent there by a friend.

LinkedIn is another major player in on-line business to business networking. Since the recent introduction of ‘open’ groups, discussions are searchable and it is easier than ever for the 80 million members to be found because of their area of expertise.

And then there are smartphones. Anyone with a smartphone can search the web on the go and find suppliers for their needs. If your website displays well on mobile phones and your competitors doesn’t that’s great. If it’s the other way round you’ve lost the game.

If your product label or special offer flyer has a QRCode (a Quick Response bar code) a smartphone will read it and bring people to you.

So, you make sure your website is optimised for search engines like Google and Bing (SEO) and that it displays well on smartphones. You swap your email newsletter for a blog, set up a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a LinkedIn profile, start your own YouTube channel, make some videos, optimise those too and then resume blasting out your sales messages, right?

Wrong!

If your buyer behaviour has changed then your marketing style must also change.

The reason buyers changed their behaviour is that THEY DO NOT WANT SALES MESSAGES. If they find you on Facebook and Twitter and you are just broadcasting the same old stuff in the same old way they’ll ignore it in the same way they do direct mail or unsolicited email.

So here’s the second big question: If a buyer can find your competitors just as easily as you, why should they buy from you?

Go on, answer that question. If you don’t know why, how will a buyer know?

How well do you know your customers? Do you know what they are trying to accomplish in THEIR business or THEIR lives? Does what you do provide them with what they need to do this? Where do you fit in with what THEY want?

It used to take masses of market research to discover this but with the technology we all have at our fingertips it is much easier to find out what your potential customers are thinking, what they need, what they like and what it takes for them to trust you. It involves having conversations – real, two way communication, not one-way sales broadcasts.

When they find you, you need to engage them and encourage them to engage with you. If this sounds time consuming and laborious think about it this way. A conversation with one person on Twitter or Facebook or via a comment on a blog or a forum will be ‘overheard’ by hundreds of other people. All of these media are platforms for you to engage with more people, more closely targeted, more quickly than ever before and for them to pass those messages on to others in their network at the click of a mouse.

Its not easy but its not that hard either. The technology is made for non-techy people to use so don’t get hung up on that. A few simple pointers and some common sense will help you to avoid wasting time.

The main thing we all need to do is change from thinking of mass, largely untargeted and one-way sales messages to discovering individual needs by engagement and two way conversations.

Considering how few people like to ‘sell’ and how many love to help people to discover what they need, it’s really not that hard once you get your head around it.

So, how DO you market your business in an age of mass empowerment?

1. Be found
2. When you’re found, be engaging
3. When you engage, listen
4. When you listen, offer help
5. When you help, develop trust
6. When you’re trusted you’ll be bought.

Should you pay for this or DIY?

You CAN do all of this yourself but you need work out how much it costs you. If you are running a business your time is not ‘free’ it is valuable. Spending earning time on these activities needs to be balanced with everything else you could be doing to grow your business.

Marketing agencies, web designers, SEO experts, social media experts (treat these with great caution – what did they do before they were SoMe experts?), copywriters and graphic designers all need to know how these new tools and strategies fit together. Most of them are learning as they go along because everything is so new and changes happen fast and often without warning. If they admit that and work WITH you, they’re worth talking to. If anyone suggests you automate everything, walk away.

The key is to see if they are using these techniques in their own businesses and how successful they are at making it work. There is no one person that can do all this for you. If you are a small business, don’t try to imitate a large company – it just won’t work.

There is no one-size fits all so explore what is the best solution for your business and don’t be shoehorned into a pre-determined process.

For help with getting started, take a look at our Social Media for Business Workshop – it’s a half day, toe-in-the water exploration designed to help beginners save time and develop a strategy that works for your specific business.

This is a huge subject and I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions so please share them below. ……….