How Do You Harness The Power of Your Spouse For Your Technology Business?

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Over our 15+ years as business coaches, we’ve worked with hundreds of business owners and met with thousands more.  When we are meeting with a new potential customer, the business owner will sometimes involve their spouse in the discussions (whether that spouse is an employee or not).  But when we meet with the owner of a technology company it’s about 100% guaranteed that we will meet the spouse as part of the process.  Why is that?

Jack and I have had versions of this discussion numerous times over the years and decided to share some of our insights during tonight’s show.  We talk about reasons why the spouses seem to carry an inordinate amount of influence when it comes to owners of IT companies.  It’s all done for good reasons and with the best of intentions.  We also share some strategies for how the technology company owner can harness that influence to supercharge the success of their business.

Technology company owners are some of our favorites clients.  Our experience has shown them to not only be wickedly smart and curious, but also some of the most kind and caring people who do business the right way.  It’s often the people side of the business, everything from employees to customers to vendors, that leads to the frustrations and potential struggles.  We get IT business owners and this show is for you!

 

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

 

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How Do You Keep the Family Together?

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The majority of our business coaching clients have some sort of family (or close friends who are like family) that are part of their business.  And many of these business owners talk with us about bringing other family members or friends into the business.  The most common are children, spouses, and siblings.  Our initial reaction to this discussion is to advise our client to not do it.  They are often surprised by this guidance.

We usually start with a “no” because we want to make sure that this close person is really the best person for the job.  There are a lot of perceived and real negatives that come with bringing these close folks into the business.  Not the least of which is that these new people have a lot of influence on the owner of the business and a lot of additional access than most other employees.  This is due simply to their relationship to the owner vs. something they’ve earned.

We recognize that many owners have a dream of creating and growing a business to turn over to their kids.  While this is a great idea and goal, we often pull the reigns in on our clients to slow them down and make them think long and hard about whether this is truly what’s best for the business and the family.  A lot of unintended consequences come from bringing family and close friends into the business.  Not the least of which is you make it difficult to get away from your business because the closest people in your life are now also in your business.

On tonight’s show we share a lot of stories of our coaching clients who have brought in and are struggling to eject family members and still keep the family together.  There’s a lot of undue pressure on the owners as part of this process.  But don’t worry, you’re not alone!

 

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How Do You Draft The Right Players for Your Team?

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With the NFL Draft just 24 hours away, folks across the country are buzzing about who their favorite team is going to draft. This is especially true in our home town where our beloved Cleveland Browns own the #1 and #4 picks in the draft. Just about everyone (locally and nationally) has an opinion about what they should do with those picks. But ultimately, one person, the General Manager John Dorsey will be the one who decides what to do. And he will be the one who gets the credit or the blame depending how those draft picks perform.

How come certain executives and teams seem to draft well and others don’t? The players they are choosing from is a pool of very talented folks. So do some folks just have a better knack for picking players than others? Or is it something else that makes those players selected successful?

As a small business owner, you also get credit or blame for how the people you hire perform. Identifying and hiring (i.e. drafting) the right people is a big part of it, but there are other things that determine the success or failure of those team members. Things like your culture, training, coach (CEO).

A common thing you’ll hear about the great players is that they make others around them better. This is true of great players, coaches, owners, and anyone else with greatness. One of your biggest jobs as the owner is to not only identify the right players for your team, but also create the environment to get the best out of them.

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

  • Cleveland Browns (http://www.clevelandbrowns.com)
  • National Football League (“NFL”) (https://www.nfl.com)
  • New England Patriots (http://www.patriots.com)
  • Tom Brady (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brady)
  • Bill Belichick (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Belichick)
  • John Dorsey (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dorsey_(American_football))
  • Hue Jackson (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_Jackson)
  • Indeed (www.indeed.com)
  • ZipRecruiter (www.ziprecruiter.com)
  • My Cousin Vinny (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104952/)
  • Atlas (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_(mythology))

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How Do I Craft A Marketing Plan (cont.)?

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As discussed during last week’s show, we recently engaged another Marketing firm to assist us in crafting a Marketing Plan for our business that is focused on getting our Message clarified.  Quite simply we’re trying to figure out how to explain what it is that we do.  Something as simple as business coaching doesn’t quite cover it.

Over the years we’ve utilized lots of phrases to try and encapsulate what we do.  These phrases include: Good Business Made Better; Train, Mentor, and Inspire; Get Business Owners Unstuck From the State of How; and even Dirty Secrets of Small Business.  We’ve recently come up with a few more, but who knows if they capture the essence of what we’re all about.  Things like: Helping You Get Your Arms Around Your Business or Contrarians.

One key thing we find business owners don’t do enough of is profiling their best clients/customers.  If you don’t know what a good customer looks like, how do you know when you come into contact with one?  Things like gender, age, size of business, and geographic location.

This Marketing thing is really messy, challenging, frustrating, and can lead to lots of silly giggling fits.  It can make your brain hurt…in a good way.  Listen to tonight’s continuation of the discussion we started in last week’s show about Marketing Plans.

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

Kilroy Was Here (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here)

 

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How Do I Craft A Marketing Plan?

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One of the more daunting and frustrating things for business owners is putting together a practical marketing plan…and finding someone to help you do it.  In the small business world there are a lot of people who are selling themselves as marketers or marketing professionals but we have found very few can actually deliver results.

Keep in mind that the purpose of marketing is to drive sales.  Marketing does this by generating leads for your business which can mean folks walking in the door, the phone ringing, or the email box filling up.  Once the leads come in the business’s job is to move those leads to either a yes or no in terms of buying from your business.  The most confusing thing is getting folks to understand exactly what marketing is and how to pull together a meaningful plan.

We have engaged several marketing professionals and firms over the year to assist MVP with this process.  We’ve typically gotten good nuggets from each but haven’t found sustained success.  We look at three key components to marketing: i) Targets: who are good customers for you; ii) Message: why do customers buy from you; and iii) Channels: how do you communicate your Message to your Targets?

Sounds simple right?  But it’s not easy and can take years to continue to evolve and improve your marketing plan to where you are getting the sustained results you’re looking for that will continually drive qualified leads your way.

 

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

 

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How Did We Get to 100 So Quickly (Reflecting on 1st 100 Episodes)

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Kids grow up so fast.  It’s hard to believe our “kid” the show Dirty Secrets of Small Business is now 100, as in 100 shows!  Where did all the time go, what have we accomplished, and where do we go from here?

We started from humble beginnings of wanting to help small business owners worldwide by sharing our experiences as well as the stories of our hundreds of clients.  We thought it would be helpful to shed some light on the “dirty secrets” of small business that we know very well but are constantly surprised more folks aren’t aware of.  There are also several commonly-held myths that the general population has about small business and we wanted to debunk those myths.  Along the way we figured we’d pick a few fights and hopefully provide some inspiration and perspective to our fellow small business owners.

We’ve taken on a range of topics where we’ve shed some light on the dirty secrets for how things are done and also debunked lots of myths.  One of the most popular has been focused on getting into business for yourself, whether that be by starting or buying a company.  Nearly as numerous have been the shows that cover the importance of the numbers when it comes to business.  This includes things like setting your selling price to understanding your financials to figuring out how to calculate and award year-end bonuses.  How about dealing with friends and family members who are part of your business?  What could go wrong with hiring your sibling? How do you get rid of that in-law in the business when things don’t go quite as you were hoping?  We also have a half dozen shows addressing the “9-to-5” or “job” mentality that can drive owners mad!  How come nobody understands why you can’t take a vacation and enjoy yourself or you can’t find that switch to turn your brain off and stop thinking about your business?

What’s the future hold?  To date, we’ve only had a couple of guests but we’re planning to have more, especially ones who can share their stories with you directly.  As we continue to promote the show and get discovered by more people, we know that you the audience will become a bigger part of the show which will include more phone calls, texts, tweets, and emails to address your questions directly.  We’d also like to become bigger advocates for the small business people in the world as they need more champions.  We see the show being syndicated in markets across the country to expand our reach to more local markets.  We’re just getting started.  Thanks for being part of the ride so far!

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

Professional Business Coaches Alliance (https://www.businesscoachesalliance.com)

 

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How Do You Deal With False Starts During A Business?

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Most business owners don’t start a company with a plan to exit the business and transition it to the next generation.  Fortunately many owners do spend some time working on a plan to transition the ownership to the next generation as they begin to think about winding things down.  But there can be many false starts along the way that are common challenges but can be avoided or minimized.

One big mistake we see is where the current owner takes the “osmosis” approach of telling the next generation to just follow them around for the next 6 months and do what they do.  Another is the the individual parties are too focused on themselves vs. the other involved parties and the business itself.  Nothing will stall discussions and plans faster than folks focusing too much on themselves when it comes to a transition.  Yet another common false start is when it becomes apparent that the next generation isn’t quite ready to take over yet.  How do you get them up to speed so that you as the exiting owner feel comfortable stepping back and eventually stepping away?

It is a good idea to get input from folks who are outside your business.  If nothing else those folks tend to be more objective and less emotional than those in the business.  A big stumbling block can be talking with too many outsiders because they will often give different opinions and advice which can often be conflicting.  Plus more information isn’t always better.  Another common stumbling block is engaging the wrong outside advisors who are more skilled with the nuts and bolts of structuring a transaction vs. the transition of day-to-day management fo the company.

One of the things we do in our coaching business is to facilitate lots of discussions between the interested parties which include a lot of “what if” scenarios to help the parties talk through the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Plus we do it in plain English vs. some other professionals who will be speaking their own language!  Don’t let the false starts stop your business transition.  Focus on getting the plans together that are based on MVP’s 7 Keys to Success (http://maximumvp.com/7-keys-to-success/).  Get some inspiration and ideas from our show today!

 

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

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How Do I Handle An Employee Quitting Unexpectedly?

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Most of us as business owners have been there.  Things are going along great, we finally have what appears to be the right team in place.  And then boom!  One of your key people comes in and gives their 2-week notice.  What’s a boss to do?

Often the initial reaction to a good person resigning is that you want to do whatever it takes to make them stay.  The pain of them leaving is almost too much to bear at this point.  You know that as the owner it is likely that you’ll have to be the one plugging the gap to make up for what they were doing.  Who has time for that?  Plus you’ll have to go through the process of finding, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and training someone new.  So what’s an owner to do?  Well, it depends.

There’s no one right answer to this situation.  It really depends on why the person is leaving.  We recently had a client where this happened with a key employee who decided to leave so he could make more money.  Another client had someone resign because some of the job duties they were given weren’t something they were comfortable doing.  Yet another had someone resign because they got an offer from another business.

We provided different guidance for each of these clients because their particular situations were all different.  For the one who was leaving to make more money, despite the owners’ desire to try to work something out to pay this person more, we advised them to let the person go.  For the one who was leaving due to the job duties going beyond their comfort zone, we advised the owner to go back with a paired down job description that would focus on those things this person was experienced in and liked doing.  What do you do when this happens?

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

 

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How Do You Find Money For Your Business?

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We’ve boiled down the focus of our coaching business to what we call 7 Keys to Success.  One of those Keys to Success that can dominate all the others is #6 on our list, Cash Flow Forecast.  If you have cash concerns a a business owner, nothing else will matter until you have that cash issue figured out.

The “cash” issue can come up in a lot of ways.  It could be vendors pressing you for payment, payroll coming due at the end of the week, or the impending tax bill.  Whatever is causing the cash pressure, until you find an answer to solve it, you won’t be able to be the leader of your business that your team needs.

In tonight’s show, we provide some insights and ideas into ways you can find cash for your business.  We start with some pretty basic ones that most people think about and have tried, banks and/or investors.  But we then get into some more creative ideas about ways to utilize competitors and/or vendors to help fund your business.  We even touch on ways to tap into some of the assets on your balance sheet to find alternative ways to raise money including the sale of some assets or even looking into factoring your receivables.  You could even look online and set up a crowdfunding page (e.g. GoFundMe) or tap into your personal IRA.

Whatever cash pinch you might be feeling now or anticipating, tonight’s show will give you some ideas and answers for how to find money for your business.

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

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How Do You Know If You Can Afford That New Hire?

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We recently had a client who had an opportunity present itself in the form of a potential employee who was a “rock star” by all accounts.  The issue was our client wasn’t actively looking to hire someone yet and he was cash poor at this point in the year due to a recent investment in some inventory.  So he was asking us how he determine if he could afford to higher this person or not.

During our discussion we took our client through a couple of things.  First, we talked about the Functional Organization Chart he was working on because we wanted to use that to frame a potential job description for this “rock star”.  We knew if we couldn’t get the role laid out for this person then there was no need to move forward.  In this case we were able to figure out the role pretty quickly.

Next we talked about looking beyond the annual salary for this person and focusing on what they would cost the business for 90 days.  That way we’re looking at a decision for $15,000 or $20,000 vs. $60,000 or $80,000.  We look at it that way because if this new hire isn’t working out within 90 days then you will part ways with them.

We also talked about plugging this new person into the Profit Plan for the next 12 months to see what impact they would have on the profitability of the overall business.  We know most owners don’t have a “budget”, or as we refer to it as a Profit Plan, so it’s imperative to get one set up where you’re forecasting your sales and expenses by month for the next 12 months.  It gives you great visibility on any decision you make for your business and the resulting impact you expect.

 

People, Companies and Resources We Mentioned in the Show

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