Posted by jpayne on February 8, 2009 under Business Coaching | 
Julia Comments: In this open and frank article, James Frost talks about the importance of seeking a business mentor who can provide a company with the necessary strategic direction
Coast Digital CEO James Frost sold price comparison website CompareandSave for more than £12 million, but he’s the first to admit it’s been a bumpy ride.
When I started my website design business in the 1990s, I quickly learnt that money doesn’t last very long. I got through all of it (about £20,000) in the first few months.
My approach was just to get the work so I could pay the bills and I had this unrealistic view that the bank would be falling over itself to lend me money. They made it quite clear they had been burnt from dotcom businesses before and would not view any application for funding favourably. I ended up having to draw money from my mortgage to get additional capital, which was around £50,000.
The experience taught me the importance of being able to take advice and support from people when it’s available, even though it can sometimes be easy to dismiss. After I got support from a business mentor everything became much more goal-oriented and the business started to find its direction.
‘My approach was to get the work so I could pay the bills’
Another lesson I learned is that you have to fight for things: they’re not just going to be given to you. Before I started out I was promised some contracts from old friends and colleagues from previous companies. However, once it came to the crunch, most of these offers evaporated. If they had followed through with their promises then that would have kept us going for longer in those first few months, but I may never have started the business if I had known they were going to change their minds. So, in a sense I suppose, they did me a favour.
Keep going
I started my current business, Coast Digital, in 2002. It was a 50:50 joint venture, and what caused me a lot of pain and anxiety was that when it came to needing more money, my partner was nowhere to be seen. So I had to make the decision to buy him out.
It made me realise that if you are going to embark on a joint venture, you need to have a clear outline of each other’s expectations first. Friendship and business don’t mix otherwise. By the time I set up Compareandsave.com with another partner in 2005, I learned my lesson. Falling out with a good friend has got to be my biggest regret in the last seven years.
In the early days of Compareandsave.com I was trying to do everything on a shoestring, but my partner pointed out that the company would never achieve its full potential that way. That was hard to accept at first, as we were running the company as a side operation and I didn’t want to lose him from working full-time at Coast Digital.
The problem was that I was consumed by the other business and didn’t want to get too caught up in a side project. It’s possible we may have made greater headway if we’d focused more on the new business, although it worked out well in the end.
The key thing to remember in business is that you have to be prepared to change, but also be open to suggestions from other people.
This article appeared on http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and business coaching to SMEs and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on February 3, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Big Businesses Can Do Differently
10 Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 3:
Short Sightedness
Let’s understand some basics about human nature in corporate culture.
By their very nature, short-sighted people are unable to see into the future and therefore must practice caution. Their lack of long-term thinking means they have more time to focus on immediate profits.
Short-term thinking about immediate profits is dangerous because it causes people to place less emphasis on the importance of customers and ignore the bigger picture of corporate longevity.
We all have ‘negative experience’ stories about wanting to return a product to a store only to get caught up in a battle of principles. Every shop has at one time or another lost future revenue due to their insistence of hanging onto a few present-day pennies.
This lack of long-term, big picture thinking is utter commercial suicide and it frequently spills over into other areas of business. Short-sightedness with regard to forming strategy, developing high performers, listening to differing opinions and opening channels to market are just a selection of what, I am sure, we have all experienced at some point in our career.
It’s important to remember that not everyone is good at seeing the bigger picture. If you can, start to try and encourage others to. It may be with small steps within your own department or function. When people see change occurring at grass roots level, it can quickly have an effect and open new avenues of thinking and ultimately, action.
Action:
Focus on long-term thinking. Eliminate short-sightedness. Remember the importance of the customer. Encourage others to see the bigger picture.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on February 2, 2009 under Business Coaching |
The behaviour of a company’s leader is crucial to the entire organisation.
The behaviour of leaders set examples that communicate more than anything else. A leader’s greatest tool in leading others is the combination of their personality and behaviour.
While a leader’s greatest contribution is how well they communicate ideas, influence those around them, demonstrate the behaviour they talk about, and inspire others to join together in accomplishing a common goal.
It is a fact that the further up the ladder a leader moves, the greater the risk of loss of constructive feedback.
Giving constructive feedback to anyone is difficult at best for most people. Coaching helps to fill this gap. When done well, coaching accelerates the development of both managers and leaders.
The attraction, retention and development of qualified staff are also key concerns as organisations adapt to an ever changing and challenging world around them.
Executive Coaches work with leaders to develop leadership skills, encouraging them to lead by example and how to best support their teams to engage in ongoing professional and personal skill learning programmes and to be motivated and committed.
Direct Benefits of Coaching:
It is increasingly recognised that individuals and groups perform better with coaching and this performance translates into business results. Some of the specific ways in which coaching is beneficial include:
Coaching for leadership. Impacts companies through increased productivity, improved communication, increased staff commitment and loyalty and decreased levels of stress and tension.
Coaching assists individuals to remain loyal and committed to the company in the face of demanding global business hours, language barriers, differing work ethics and economic fluctuations.
Coaching can help prevent executive derailment, which, as some studies suggest, can be as high as thirty-three per cent for senior executives.
Coaching helps managers develop better interpersonal skills. Some common reasons for interpersonal conflict include executives being too abrasive, too controlling and too isolated.
Coaches work with executives to explore these behaviours, to recognise and regulate their self-defeating beliefs, assumptions and actions.
Coaching helps leaders to think and plan more strategically, to manage risk more effectively, to create and communicate vision and mission.
Coaching aids in developing a culture of trust, commitment and personal responsibility both internally and with the external world of clients and customers.
Coaching enables the executive or manager to leverage his or her personal power more effectively.
Coaching can develop those leadership qualities that have been empirically proven to be associated with success.
These include: cognitive capacity, social capacities, personality style, motivation, knowledge and expertise.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 28, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Businesses Can Do Differently
Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 2:
Build Strong Client Relationships
It has always been essential to develop strong client relationships, but in today’s economic climate it is vital and could prove to be the difference to survival.
What can you do to build relationships?
1. Understand your client’s perspective.
In order to do this successfully, you need to listen to your clients. That means listening and not hearing what you want to hear or even worse, putting spin on their words to fit your own needs. Work to their agenda and ask questions that are going to forward your client’s position and not your own.
2. Speak your client’s language.
It is a myth that clients want to be wowed by your corporate language. To be honest, they’re just not interested. Their bottom line is that they want to understand what’s in it for them and how you are going to help them, in simple plain English. The best sales people will know that instinctively and will present in a language that is familiar and comfortable to their client.
This may be far removed from the way their organisation talks about the same subject, but what is more important - the sale, or corporate-speak? Which one pays the bills?
3. Go that extra mile.
How often have you done something for your client just because? Everyone will bend over backwards to help a client if a sale is imminent, but what about building the relationship? Do you as an organisation know what your standard service is and do you know what your ‘extras’ are or should be? Do you know when you should be employing those extras?
Not knowing may allow your competitors an entry point. It is the responsibility of everyone within your organisation to be providing A1 client service. However, it is the responsibility of the management team to ensure that client service is part of the culture and not something that is wheeled out when a sale is on the horizon.
The words ‘corporate humility’ are becoming more familiar to organisations nowadays, especially larger organisations. We are all reliant on our clients, but it is time to start treating them as one of our most valuable resources.
Action:
Listen. Speak your client’s language. Go that extra mile. Value your clients
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 26, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Businesses Can Do Differently
Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 1:
Build a Complimentary Team and Organisation
Look around your organisation. How many people are there from the same university, the same MBA class and at a senior executive level, the same club? Does this approach truly benefit your company or is it limiting the scope of growth and progression?
Adopting this more traditional approach is what I call the ‘chummy mentality’. Recruiting people in your own image, who evidence a similar educational background, hold a similar viewpoint and come from a similar background.
Whilst this approach may provide continuity and a pleasant working environment, is it really benefitting today’s leading companies?
Recent events would seem to suggest that a like-mindedness is not what is required. Consider the integrity of some of our largest corporations. Highly intelligent people at the helm, but also at the centre of every controversy. We must ask ourselves were those voicing a differing opinion listened to? Where was the challenge? Where was the compromise?
Fresh ideas and values, people not afraid to express their views and a new way of doing things are essential and to be encouraged if the creativity and objectivity of an organisation are not to be diluted. Diversity is to be celebrated not sidelined.
The prized ceos will surround themselves with people who compliment their skill set, not those who match it. They will seek to be challenged. There is a line of thinking which says that the ceo should be the stupidest person in the room. Whilst this may sound bizarre, in essence it is sound common sense. No one person can have all the ideas or be abreast of the latest thinking . A smart executive will recognise this and build a team that has an individual yet complimentary skill set.
Action:
Build a complimentary team. Look for different skill sets and fresh ideas. Embrace challenge.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 13, 2009 under Strategic Planning |
Read any Strategic Planning book and by the end, you will have come up with some thoughts which will help define your company’s strategy. Read a couple of books and you will have even more thoughts and if you read several, you can blow your mind. The point is, there are so many different strategies your company can follow.
Which one is right for your company though?
Consider these positions:
Are you offering outstanding customer service, such as Singapore Airlines?
Are you positioning yourself as the low-price leader, such as ASDA?
Are you positioning yourself in a specific market sector, for example SAGA?
To provide the answer, the question you should be asking is; what should your business strategy do for your company?
In essence, it should define your company’s intent. It defines what your company intends to deliver to its customers and clients. Strategy itself though is just the first step in the process. The journey to profitability is dependent on whether you can execute your strategy to achieve business goals.
Companies throughout the world, invest huge amounts of time and money into identifying opportunities and developing the perfect strategy to maximise them. Typically though, the majority of these resources are wasted.
Why is this? Well it’s not because the strategy that is at fault, it’s not even because the ideas are flawed, rather it is the company’s ability to implement their plan.
Research has shown that less than 10% of all actions from strategic planning sessions are effectively implemented and this should start to ring alarm bells for management teams and functional heads alike.
What can you do about it?
1. Delivery. Recognise what your organisation can realistically deliver. To do this, it is important to know the capacity of your organisation, what resources you have available and the capabilities of your team. Demanding too much, too soon can overstretch many crucial areas of the business. Small incremental changes are preferable to whole-scale transformation, unless you are prepared for it.
2. Communication. It is essential that your strategy is communicated throughout the whole organisation and repeated as frequently as possible. Unless employees can understand how the strategy applies to them and importantly, to their jobs, then you will never achieve total buy in and execution will be far from effective.
3. Infrastructure. Do you have the appropriate infrastructure to support your strategy? You wouldn’t put a Ferrari engine into a mini, so why expect processes that were put in place years ago to support your new strategy. Now may be the time to review those essential systems.
4. Alignment. Business goals, performance metrics and rewards need to be aligned with your strategy. What may have previously passed muster may not be appropriate now. To be effective, rewards must drive behaviour, which in turn must support your strategy.
Too many times, both business strategy and its implementation is nothing more than a fancy powerpoint presentation or workflow. It needs to be living and breathing, used, referred to and communicated each and every day. You may have defined the route, but have you defined how you are going to make the journey?
Julia Payne Associates have been implementing and providing business coaching and strategic planning to SME’s to FTSE 500 companies for the past 20 years. Why don’t you contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.