Success Coach

by Don Harkey

Short article today, but I am very excited this week. I have known Randy Mayes for more than 2 years now. I have attended his course, seen him speak, and sent numerous people to him for Executive Coaching, all with rave reviews. I'm not sure why it took me 2 years to pull the trigger, but I finally did, and yesterday, Randy and I had our first coaching session.

Randy is known as the "Success Coach". He comes from a perspective of a successful business owner (he used to own Springfield Janitorial Supply) and also as a disciple of Christ. A couple of years ago, he formally began his coaching business and has quickly become well known in the Springfield area. He has no shortage of success stories. So what is Executive Coaching like with Randy?

Randy helps give focus. It's just that simple. He begins the session with "what do you want to focus on today" and won't let you get away with something that is too broad. Then he gets right to it asking questions and drilling down to get more detailed answers. Everything leads to action and every action must align with the individual. I must say, he has a real talent for it!

In my first session, we focused on my business. We talked about my short term strategy versus my long term strategy. What he does is different from "strategic planning" in that he applies it to your life rather than to your business. Even though we talked about my business, everything was in the perspective of the needs for my life. I left the meeting with specific action items and another appointment for our next coaching session. Oh yeah... I also left the meeting pumped up and very excited!

I give a lot of referrals. I rate my referrals "A", "B", or "C" (I don't give out "D" or "F" referrals!). A "C" referral is someone who makes a good impression, but I don't know much about. A "B" referral is someone either I trust or someone I know well trusts, but I haven't used their service enough. An "A" referral is someone I know will do a great job. Randy is one of my rare "A" referrals! Need some focus in your life? Check him out!

http://www.thesuccesscoachnetwork.com

Social Media Think Tank Takes Off in Springfield

by Don Harkey

About a month ago, I was chatting with Kurt Theobald, an entrepreneur and fellow business consultant in Springfield about the use of Social Media in business. We both were on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and had played with a few other services. If you play with these services, you will quickly discover that there are multiple uses for each and that they all can take up a tremendous amount of time (especially Facebook). Are these things business owners / leaders should get involved with or are they simply a waste of time? How can these "tools" be applied effectively to a variety of business processes? That's when Kurt said, "let's pull together a think tank to talk about it".

Our first meeting was almost a month ago and only 4 people showed up, but our discussion was very good. It quickly became apparent that we needed to focus on the processes rather than on the tools. We also quickly discovered that the greatest potential comes from utilizing tools in combination with each other. We published a few of our findings on Twitter along with an open invitation to our next meeting.

Last week we met again and had 8 people come in, many of whom had heard of the team primarily on Facebook. I want to tell you we had QUALITY people at that meeting. We had a recruiter who used social media to connect with potential recruits. We had an entrepreneur who is working on the next social media application focused on the creative arts. We had a communications expert who works as an adviser for politicians. We had a business owner who had been using social media from its inception. We had a web developer who's knowledge of web tools is impressive. We had a representative from the Springfield Business Journal who works on a team exploring the implications of social media and the web on print media. The bottom line is that we have a great team and the discussion showed it... and the discussion is occurring right here in Springfield, Missouri!

After the meeting, the participants immediately began publishing some of the discussions and the enthusiasm for the project spread even more. We have since had to change our venue from the backroom at Hebrew's Coffee to the Brentwood Library to hold all of the people we expect to attend the next session. One of our goals is to develop some "best practices" for social media in business and then work to "get the word out" into the Springfield area.

If you are in the Springfield, Missouri area and would like to participate in our Social Media Think Tank, you can attend our next session at:

Brentwood Library
May 11th @12:30PM

RSVP on Twitter by sending a tweet using #sgfsmtRSVP.

Follow Social Media Think Tank tweets by searching #sgfsmt, by following the RSS Feed (http://tinyurl.com/czt9xn) or by following donharkey and kurttheobald on Twitter.

I think we are on to something very exciting! Let's get some focus on applying these tools and then let's get the word out!

Competition Drives Costs UP

by Don Harkey

Every American knows that nothing drives down costs like competition. The more players in a particular market, the lower the costs will be for the consumer because of the different players will need to drive down costs to compete with the other players in the market. Pretty simple, right? Wrong.

Competition does not always drive costs down for the consumer. Think about an airport that utilizes 4 different airlines. Let's say that each airline operates its own ticket counter, manages its own security check in, its own crews, its own airplane maintenance crew and even its own arrival/departure boards.

First of all, as a consumer, you will see a quality issue in terms of service. If your United flight is canceled, it is unlikely that they will put you on the Northwest flight leaving in a half hour. Imagine running 4 different security lines (all unbalanced because you have to go to the security gate of YOUR airline. Imagine the confusion on switching flights. You have to find your departure board and only people from your airline can help you. What about the costs? The operational costs of these 4 airlines are sky high (pun intended). Instead of one maintenance crew capable of handling the entire airport, they must maintain 4 crews. This means more parts inventory, more people, and sacrificed efficiency.

The point here is competition does not always drive costs down. In fact, the opposite is frequently true. Most of today's most successful companies are constantly looking to their competition for opportunities to collaborate and share resources. As long as price fixing doesn't occur, the value of these collaborations are passed to the customers.

This is also true for people. Competition can inspire people to do great things, but in the end, it is team work that truly makes people more effective and more efficient. Inspiriting competition within your organization in a way that discourages collaboration will lead to increased costs, decreased morale, and inefficiency!

Accounting - Is it Holding Us Back?

by Don Harkey

When I meet with a company who is considering launching a new quality program or implementing a training program, one of the first things I ask is "what are you trying to accomplish?". The most common answer is "we want to reduce our expenses and save some money". They want to improve their "bottom line". That is when I push back.

Here is an interesting hypothesis for you... I am beginning to believe that one of the most dangerous and hindering factors in American business today is Accounting. WHAT?!?

As a profession, accounting seems like a fairly non-controversial entity. Current accounting rules are seldom questioned and are taught like a hard science in many business schools. It is simply the way it is done... and it often leads to doing things wrong.

Companies often make decisions in order to drive their balance sheets. This is understandable as corporations are often judged by their balance sheets. Let me give an example.

A corporation allows its employees to keep a "vacation balance". In other words, employees are allowed to carry over unused vacation days to the next year. During the recession, the company decides to help their balance sheets by telling employees to drive down their vacation balance to nothing by the end of the year. What is the impact on the company? This is a major benefit for the balance sheet. The vacation balances show up as a liability owed to its employees. For example, an employee who makes $20/hour and has 80 hours (2 weeks) of saved vacation is a $1600 liability to the company (the company would "owe" the employee that money if they left). If this represented the average balance for an employee within a company of 10,000 people, cutting the vacation balances would "save" the company $16,000,000! That's a nice sum of money to talk about for the person who made that decision at evaluation time!

Take a second now and think about what the company just did. First of all, during a particularly challenging time in the company history, this response for the company is to send its people home. Rather than innovating, creating, and finding new value for its customers, the employees of this company are spending extra vacation time. This doesn't seem like a good idea.

Secondly, consider the actual impact of this move. The company needs a certain number of hours to make the product or service and run the company. In this example, we cut 800,000 hours of work out of the year. If the company has a decreased demand that requires 800,000 fewer manhours, then everything is balanced. This is seldom the case. If the company requires only 200,000 less hours than normal, then the company must make up the other 600,000 hours in production. The only way to accomplish this is to either hire more people or work overtime. At time and a half, this equates to $18,000,000 in overtime. Whoops!

OK. Yes, if the company had looked at the accounting closely, they would have balanced this out. However, the reality is actually more complex than the example above. Productivity is not linear (production/hour becomes less efficient as it slows down). Yet many companies prefer to oversimplify and send their people home on extra vacation.

The bottom line is that anytime a company focuses on running by the metrics, they make bad decisions. The metrics can be used to help make decisions, but the final decisions must be made strategically with the companies total future in mind.