Month: May 2013

A common way
for a small company
to get bigger
is to merge with another small company.

This is common
but not easy.
According to a recent
Harvard Business Review study,
between 70 and 90 percent
of mergers fail.

Glen LeBlanc
has twice helped companies merge.
In May/June’s CMA Magazine,
he shares

“One of the biggest challenges
was merging business cultures.
Financially, it’s easy finding reasons
to bring companies together.
But can you bring
customers and employees with you
to the end of the journey.

You have to develop a common culture
that everyone signs up for,
and get people to see
that the future can be brighter
by showing progress
in your new strategy.”

Consider cultures
when deciding
whether or not to merge.

As we move into the summer months,
some of us are considering
hiring high school students to help
with projects.

The key to hiring students is…
assume they know absolutely nothing.
This is great
because many of them
don’t have bad work habits
(they are often also
full of exciting new ideas, insights and energy)
but it can also be challenging
because we need to guide them
in every aspect of the job.

As recruiter
Pamela Kleibrink Thompson
shares in
May/June’s
The Costco Connection

“Define all aspects of the job,
including punctuality, scheduling
and how to work with customers.

Make sure the employees also know
what you don’t want them
to do on the job,
such as texting,
talking on the phone and
chatting with friends who stop by.

Make expectations, requirements
and milestones clear –
and be consistent with
rewards or consequences.”

Factor in extra management time
when hiring high school students.

One of my past managers
was so moody,
we had a signal
to tell other people
what type of mood
he was in.

If the blue flag was up,
he was in a bad mood.
If the blue flag was down,
he was in a good mood.

Working for him was extremely stressful.
As soon as I located another job,
I left.

As Karen Wright,
author of
The Complete Executive,
shares in
the May/June Costco Connection

“You’re up one day
and down the next.
No problem –
the people who work for you
can just go with the flow, right?
Wrong.”

“Your people need to know
the difference between a mood swing
and a major business issue.
Help them out
by staying on an even keel
at least 90 per cent
of the time.”

Manage your own mood swings
so others won’t have to.

When asked,
in the Spring 2013
UofT Magazine,
what advice she’d give
to students wanting to make films,
Sarah Polley replied

“The most important thing is
to keep working.
It’s so easy
to make short films now
with very little budget.
There is no reason
not to start making films
instead of just thinking about them.”

Of course,
Sarah Polley’s not talking about
making special effects heavy Hollywood blockbusters.
She’s talking about making small starter films,
films made with phones and handheld devices,
films that might never be seen.

The point isn’t to make a great film.
The point is to move
from thinking to doing,
to START.

I’ve been presented
with another great
writing (business building) opportunity.
This opportunity requires
another month of crazy writing hours
and it might not pay off for years,
if at all.

This project is challenging.
It is much easier
to spend my day
answering email
than it is to work on this project
but answering email is short-term thinking.

As Mark McGuinness
shares

“Those who get swept off track
do so
because they are thinking short-term:

The phone is ringing now,
so I need to answer it.
The email has just arrived,
I need to get rid of it ASAP.
I’ll just get this one out of the way,
it shouldn’t take long…

When you think like this,
the pressures of the moment
will always feel more urgent
than settling down to wrestle
with something truly important
(and difficult).”

Do the truly important work first
even if it is more difficult.

Right now,
each one of your competitors
is doing something better than you.
It could be a small something.
It could be a different something
for each competitor.
But they are excelling at something.

As Mike Michalowicz
shares
(this entire post
is a must-read for innovators)

“Sam Walton once said,
“I believe I am Kmart’s best customer.
I have visited almost every
one of their stores.”

He constantly evaluated other retailers
and copied what they did best.
Among the many innovations
he extracted from his competition
was the centralization
of the checkout process.

Instead of having a checkout
in each department of the store,
he centralized everything
to one checkout line
at the front of the store.

Walmart leaped forward
and set a new standard
that we see everywhere today.”

Savvy business owners
learn from their competitors.

Building a brand,
a business,
a career
is difficult.
There are times
when we’ll want to quit
and if we give ourselves a choice,
we WILL quit.

Kimberly of
The Band Perry
shares

“When it came to college,
it was kind of like role reversal.
Being the oldest,
it was my decision to make
whether to pursue music
or have a fallback plan.
In discussing that with Mom and Dad,
their only comment was always very consistently,
‘If you have a fallback plan,
you are going to fall back on it
at some point.
So we need to remove Option B
and go full-throttle toward Option A.’
I don’t think we’d be here
had we not done that.”

If quitting is an option,
we WILL quit.