If you listen to any of the successful leaders in business out there, you will hear them say over and over that it is about the people. In other words, to have a successful business, you must have the right people and they must be in the right positions, playing to their strengths. Then everything will be good.

Okay, sounds good, so let’s go get the right people and everything else will be great. Then we will not need to keep the wrong people and instead, we will need to grow those that have potential. The problem with all this is that we are talking about people and when we do that, we have a lot of other factors that get in the way. Emotions are the big one, but also best intentions. You want to see the best in people, and you want to help others. These all have an influence in working to get the right team in place.

I have experienced this repeatedly, and have felt it in my gut when I knew I had the wrong person in the wrong seat and, given whatever circumstances, don’t make a change right away. I was reminded of this by a recent blog that was written by my friend, Stephen Lynch. Stephen has written a book, Business Execution for Results, that is a great step-by-step for getting the strategic plan, the alignment, the key decisions and the execution all down, so your business is spinning like a top.

The blog he sent me was called “The #1 Regret of Business Owners.” And guess what that one regret is? Hiring mistakes! As we just discussed, it’s all about the people. Stephen says that sometimes it is good performers who don’t fit into your culture. Other times, it is taking too much time to fix performance issues with someone that fits in, but is not achieving the desired result. Then there are the times we just hire the first person with a pulse to get it out of the way.

There is no perfect way to find people because, as we said, we are dealing with the complexity of humans and boy oh boy, can we be filled with intricacies. At Efficience, we have had success with process called Topgrading. It has helped us find good people, but sometimes we just have had them in the wrong seats. It may take some learning, as we have experienced, but we finally found two technical project managers that are knocking it out of the park! Thank you Chris and Sarah for great results in getting our projects done and making our clients happy!

Peter Drucker, in his very interesting book, Post-Capitalist Society, tells us why people are so important. The book is all about the societal transformation from capital, land and labor, to a knowledgeable society where individuals are central.

Drucker says, “Knowledge is not impersonal like money. Knowledge does not reside in a book, a database, a software program; they contain only information. Knowledge is always embodied in a person; carried by a person; created, augmented, or improved by a person; applied by a person; taught and passed on by a person; used or misused by a person. The shift to a knowledge society therefore puts the person in the center.”

We can see with this explanation from Drucker how important our people are, and getting the right ones on board and in the right seat is job number one for any leader! Do you have the right people sitting in the right seats?

One of the things about running a company is we get caught up in the issues that pop up daily. This, at times, blinds us to what is going on out in our business sphere – new technologies, new methods and to future opportunities. In my experience, this happens with everyone and none of us are immune. How to best deal with this is to get a coach and get help envisioning what you could achieve, but because of the constraints of our surroundings, we don’t.

The best of the best have a coach. Tiger Woods has one, Peyton Manning has one, and even the big business CEOs have one. I have written a post about the coaches to the business icons before. Why would it not serve us to have one also? At Efficience, we are pulling in a coach to help us with sales management. As I shared when I was at the EO Nerve conference recently, I saw Jack Daly’s high octane, intense and funny presentation on sales management. He said, “If you are a small- to mid-size business and you don’t have a sales manager, you will stay a small- to mid-sized company, or you will go out of business!”

An option, if you are not ready to make the leap to hiring a sales manager, is to hire a coach that will make sure you have the right processes in place and will coach your sales person or team to help get you to the level of hiring a sales manager. We have been able to get by without a formal sales process, but it does catch up with you. We are putting the position in place to make sure that we are getting what we need to maximize our value proposition and sales team to reach their potential.

I have worked with my personnel success coach, Steve D’Annuizo, for a number of years to have the highest version of who I am showing up more often than not. Steve has helped me with many facets of my life, from my spiritual and personal growth, to my business growth. One of the keys I realized from working with him is that happiness comes from within, not from what you have accumulated, what or where you have been, or what you have done. Steve came to me when I was having great business success and achieving all that I had dreamed of, but I didn’t feel a sense of completeness.

I recently received from my dad this quote that says, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time,” by Thomas A. Edison. I have found that a really good coach can give you the encouragement that, when it all seems bleak and you feel like giving up, will give you the right words and a gentle nudge to move you to get up and put the game face back on and keep going. As I have learned, any success I have had didn’t come the first, second, or tenth time. It happened because I didn’t stop!

Do you have a coach to help you break out or break down the right things to get you where you want to go?

Many times we use sports in the business world to support, inspire, and show examples of how to improve. With the start of a new football season upon us, I find this time of year very exciting! I live in a town that is all about SEC college football, boating, and tailgating. There is something special about cruising up the Tennessee River on a beautiful fall day, seeing Neyland Stadium, and tying up next to it with the Vol Navy. What an experience!

So when I saw a Sports Illustrated article titled “The Sabanization of College Football,” I was intrigued. Alabama is Tennessee’s biggest and longest successful rival, and they have won two championships since Nick Saban has been there. Also, UT head coach Derek Dooley worked under Saban at LSU in the early 2000’s. The article discusses the success of Saban’s program, and that is exactly what I have found to be a major key to success for businesses.

What it basically boils down to is that the focus should be all about the process of what they do rather than the end result. Saban focuses on the process that he requires of the players: how they train, how they call the plays, and even how they prepare for school work. The article says it best: “Instead of thinking about the scoreboard, think about dominating the man on the opposite side of the line of scrimmage. Instead of thinking about a conference title, think about finishing a ninth rep in the weight room. Instead of thinking about graduating, think about writing a great paper for Intro to Psych.”

How much can we learn from thinking like that? In my experience, we could learn a lot, especially from how they pick their people. In both sports and business, the one with the best talent will be the winner in the long run. Saban has three key sets of criteria for each player: character / attitude / intelligence. He then breaks it down by position to things like height / weight / speed. Having specific criteria like this keeps your emotions out of it and keeps you from getting off track in making decisions.

What processes and criteria do you use to determine how your company gets work done and what you look for to bring in new talent? We have processes at Efficience, but we still need to work on some areas. I need to push harder for this and inspect what I expect.

I hope you get to enjoy some great fall days with your friends and experience some big game excitement with your favorite team. Go Vols!

On my entrepreneurial path, I have realized many things come down to a few key decisions. Sometimes they are very tough decisions that can have a significant impact on people’s lives. This is what being an entrepreneur and leader of a company is all about. It is about making the big decisions that will either lead you to your success or demise. The demise part comes by not acting and putting off these tough decisions that need to be made.

These decisions can come in the form of people that should or shouldn’t be with your company, products or services that you should or shouldn’t have, or in the strategic direction of your company.

We have been having a challenge with our solutions sales manager in generating results. When he started, we worked hard to help him gain understanding of the marketplace, CRM, leads source, and messaging. We invested significant time and resources before he even started to make calls or send emails. Then after the calls and e-mails started, the volume of activity didn’t produce the needed appointments to create sales.

This left me with lots of discussions with my partners on what to do. You hate to make a change when you have made a large investment of time or money into something. You listen to the excuses that are made for why the results aren‘t there. You want to go with it, but your gut tells you something is still wrong. We even offered a commission only option as the last attempt to keep a relationship because a very small part of me said he may just need more time. Finally, my partners and I faced the writing on the wall and said enough is enough.

This is never an easy thing to do, and only a sadist would enjoy it. Afterwards, you often realize that your gut was right, and you wonder why you didn’t take this action before, especially when all this evidence surfaces supporting your decision when you finally make it.

I’ve had to do this more times in my career than I would like to admit. When I have to let someone go, I feel like I’ve failed, like I didn’t do a good enough job in the hiring process, which should have prevented this. Efficience has a very stringent hiring process, but it isn’t foolproof, so these things happen.

Whenever you have a parting of the ways, it seems to be inevitably in the best interest of all involved. The person let go learns from the situation and moves on to seek an opportunity better suited for them, and the company also learns from the circumstances and refocuses to find someone better suited for their needs. Obviously, some people deny responsibility and blame the employer, but typically I have seen people move on to positions in which they were able to excel and advance their careers.

We all have strengths, and we just need to be freed up to find them sometimes. Are you holding back and avoiding making a decision that would be in the best interest of all involved?

Watching the news these days doesn’t leave one with much hope for the future, when all we’re hearing is about inflation, unemployment and national debt.  Reports are spreading of an ongoing recession and even a possible depression before things get better.  So what is an entrepreneur to do?  Constantly trying to keep your head above water can get discouraging when you have nothing solid to look towards.  As much as I’d like to bury my head in the sand sometimes, I know that’s not a viable option.  Instead, I practice the Stockdale Paradox, which is to retain faith, regardless of the difficulties, AND confront the brutal facts, whatever they may be.

The fact is, things are not good out there, but this does not mean that there is no money or opportunity.

Let’s first consider how we view the world around us.  The word recession is defined as two consecutive, negative quarters of economic activity.  Does that mean that everyone stops spending money and the economy comes to a complete halt?  Not at all!  Now consider this:  the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the US was at $14.54 trillion in the 3^rd quarter of 2008, on an annualized basis, just before the financial meltdown.  That number never fell below $14.24 trillion, even at its lowest point in the first quarter of 2009.  So what does this mean to you?  There was still over $14 trillion being spent in the economy every year; money that you could be hustling for a share of.

Even though the overall drop was not significant, some industry sectors took a tragic hit, as much as 50%, while others grew by 20% or 30%.  In times like this, the Clipper Ship Strategy can be useful by positioning yourself to where your money is being spent.  This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do, especially with big industrial and manufacturing centers.  It’s a little more feasible to move towards the money if you’re in the service sector, and much easier for information based businesses.  The point here is just to keep moving.

Something else to try and practice, and not just when times aretough, but all the time, is to focus on what you do best and hire others to do what they do best.  The simplest way to put it is to play to your strengths.  For example, we have engaged Kopp Consulting to go out and do our cultivating of new business for us, since our strength lies in the relationships and solutions, not sales.  Obtaining new business is a venture that requires focus and attention.  In our experience, when the relationship team is trying to do the job of the cultivation team, we lose focus and don’t see optimal results.

Kopp learns about your business and has their own secret sauceto finding the right clientele and getting you in front of them.  In the months ahead I will share more of our experience with what Kopp is doing for us. 

My last thought on this topic is this question: how hard do we make it for our customers to find us?  Go ask everyone in your office if they have used the phone book in the last week, and then ask them the same question about Google.  I have seen it done and the difference is eye opening.    Content and key words are key to getting found in search engines.  Have you Googled yourself lately?

So with a recession in the air, are you keeping the faith, confronting the brutal facts, focusing on what you do best, and can your customers find you? 

It makes me pause and wonder why it bothers them at times or why they joked about it, because I see it as something so natural that everyone should do it.

What an interesting week!  Last week, I traveled to New York City to participate in the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Injected Campus event, which brings the regional EO Forums together.  We met in lower Manhattan to be close to the New York Stock Exchange.

This year during our event, the NYSE opening bell was rung by InvenSense, a company that makes the motion possible in the Wii and in smartphones.  InvenSense was launching their IPO and was going public.  I had always wanted to be there in person to see the opening bell, but it also made me think of my own dream of being up there to ring the bell with the IPO launch of my own company.  That evening, it felt a little closer as my friends on the Global EO Board got to be on stage and ring the closing bell!  WOW!  Click here to see the video I took of the opening bell.

Along with going to the Stock Exchange, we enjoyed a wonderful evening dining and socializing at the Harvard Club in Times Square.  We also heard from three great speakers and spent time with EO members that have really invested time and resources into the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, thus getting a lot in return.  This entire event was extra special! 

Matthew Kelly spoke to us at the NYSE for one of the events.  He does business consulting and wrote the book The Dream Manager.”  His talk resonated deeply with me, so I wanted to share it with you.  Matthew told a story about one time when he was playing golf.  One of the guys he was playing with seemed really down, and when Matthew asked him about it, he mentioned he was having business problems.  After digging, Matthew finally got him to reveal that he has a janitorial company with more than 400% turnover.  This man was spending all his time hiring people and had no time to work on business strategy.

Matthew inquired, “Have you asked the employees what is the problem?”  The man had not and wondered if they would even know, so Matthew said, “Let’s find out.”  They conducted a survey and realized that transportation was the main problem.  They decided to get buses to help the employees, and the business changed significantly.  The turnover rate dropped to just over 200%, so they did the survey again.  This time, they discovered the employees had dreams and desires.  They decided if the employees were helped to realize these dreams, then their respect and loyalty to the company would grow.

They hired a full time dream manager to discuss dreams with the employees.  The dream manager assisted them in creating plans and processes to put them on the path to realizing their small near-term dreams, such as purchasing a laptop or planning a vacation.  Additionally, He helped them work towards their long term dreams of buying a house or getting the proper education toward a new career. 

This approach resonated with me because I am of the type that is always strategizing about working towards the things that make the future better.  I have often asked my team what it is that they are working for and want to have in their lives as they increase their incomes.  It is astounding how the culture of a company can change and how your employees’ perception and loyalty toward their employer improves!

I am working toward my dream of building a company that can go IPO.  What are you doing to invest in the lives and dreams of those around you?

People generate the most value and are your greatest asset when running a business.  Our society runs on knowledge and information.  We are not a bunch of cogs lined up to push metal through a machine in order to output something better on the other side.  Even these types of jobs now require knowledge to operate these intricate computers and technology. 

Did you know that the unemployment rate for college educated individuals is less than 5%?   Compare that to the average unemployment rate of 9-10% or the 14% or more unemployment rate for those with a high school education or less.  Today’s economy needs knowledgeable workers, and they are a rare find.  We are searching for knowledgeable workers to fill roles in software architecture, business analysis, and software solution sales and have discovered they are not easy positions to fill.

We utilize a 13-step process, which includes a three hour CIDS interview from Topgrading.  CIDS stands for Chronological In-Depth Structured interview and looks at a candidate’s history starting from his or her education and going through each job position, identifying highs and lows along with strengths and weaknesses.  This gets to the meat of what a person was hired to accomplish and how they do in that role as confirmed by the person to whom they report. 

Even with this detailed process, we don’t always get it right.  Like software, people are very complex and don’t necessarily gel well together.  Getting it right from a technical perspective may not mean we have it right from a cultural perspective.  I hear war stories and have even experienced it myself.  When business cultures clash, all parties involved suffer.

As a leader, I must stay focused and be willing to endure because I believe the most important role of the leader is to bring the right team together.  As Jim Collins says in Good to Great, “Get the right people on the bus, and then with the right people figure out where you are going.” 

What do you do to make sure you have the right people on the bus?  

What is the most important duty of a CEO?  Bob Prosen, author of Kiss Theory Good Bye, says “Hiring people smarter than I am and putting them in the right positions!!!!” I have to agree, but creating roles and filling them with people who can play to their strengths in those positions isn’t an easy task.

Last week I did a presentation to my EO chapter on my company’s hiring process, which is built around the Topgrading methodology. It’s hard to express how important this is to us, because we put so much time and effort into taking what we’ve learned from books, speakers, and even bad hires to create something that really works for us. Our process is 13 steps, and has shown us a high success rate of getting the right people in the right places, in turn saving us money. For example, research shows that if you hire someone at 6 figures, and they turn out to be a bad hire (within what amount of time? A year? 6 months?) it can cost you as much as 1.5M in lost productivity and opportunity cost. This is reason enough alone to work harder to get it right the first time, and not just relying on your gut and a resume to make a decision on hiring someone.

In short, this is our process:

This isn’t something that happens in a day, or even a week. I and a few others on the team spend an extensive amount of time with each candidate throughout the screening process, getting to know their background, their work experience and their personality. We hone in on their natural strengths, and match them up to the needs of the company and the position. From another perspective, this also ensures that things they are not good at are not key aspects of the position.

Having a defined process and checklist in place for our hiring process is essential, but it is also extremely beneficial to other areas of business. Think of it this way, thousands of planes take off and land successfully every day. They manage this because they have a checklist to make sure they aren’t missing anything. We don’t want to miss one thing on our checklist, because that one thing could lead to making the wrong hire.