We spend a lot of time at Everon promoting from within and making our star performers responsible for key roles in the organization. This has worked well for us over time but it can be difficult at times as well. We all have a shortage of time in our week and it is hard to make sure you are slowing down enough to train those who will need to fill the key roles your business needs.

At Everon a majority of this development falls to Mike and me and over time, largely in part to Mike’s focus on development, we have done a good job. As we grow the personal mentoring becomes more difficult and we moved to a group roll playing model that also works well.

At this point we have outgrown this model as getting large portions of the team together for role playing can be difficult and running the same sessions multiple times can be time consuming.

We have started looking at online recorded training for our team and I am curious what other methods have worked well for you all over time. Any suggestions and ideas would be appreciated and as always feel free to email me directly if you prefer not reply on the site.

Hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend, now get back to work!

Josh

The fact of the matter is that we all have too much to do and we will never accomplish it all.

But have you ever met someone who seems to get a ton done every day? Weather they are a business owner, a consultant, or a tech it always seems that they are delivering?

This is in contrast to the person that is always busy but never gets anything done. We all know this person too well. We ask them what the heck they do all day, perhaps we even sit and observe them, but we just can’t seem to figure out where their time goes.

In growing a business the reality is that we cannot do everything even if we are the best time managers in the world. 

This is where the concept of top five comes in: Each day you should write the top five things you need to get done down on a note card, prioritize them in order from one to five, and then work on them one by one during the day until they are complete. Spend the last five minutes of every day creating your must do list for the next day.

Seems so very simple when I write it out like that but it is a powerful concept that when implemented will change your world. 

One trick to keep in mind is to make sure you don’t put things on your top five list that can not be accomplished. Instead put the next logical small step that needs to be taken to keep top priorities on track. For example my top goal for the quarter may be to create a vertical specific offering for health care. If I put this on my top five list: create vertical program, I am certain to fail. On the other hand if I put down: set meeting with key advisors from current clients to gain insight into what we need to develop, I have a much better chance of moving it forward with success.

I am not saying you should create easy “to do” type goals for the day but rather you need to break larger goals down into the next logical step / chunk and start working on it until you accomplish it.

I highly recommend using the top five concept because when implemented right it can have dramatic effects.

Josh

Today I was reading the blogs on the Net Promoter website and came across this post that I thought was worth sharing as it illustrates the powerful value to be gained by implementing NPS.

I have long made the argument that we all should be using NPS in our managed services business and publishing best practices as a way to know our core business is healthy, we are driving growth, and customers are remaining loyal.

The example below is a powerful story of how Charles Schwab used NPS to turn their business around from a negative NPS to a positive NPS and how that was a good predictor of their future growth.

We measure NPS for our clients after every interaction, onsite or remote, as well as through a survey each month to our main contacts and all end users. I am happy to report that as a company we have just reached our goal of a 67% NPS across all divisions. I also am happy to let you know, and may even be bragging a bit here, that our score for our remote team – services that are not onsite – has averaged 89%.

I hope this article help drive home the importance of this metric in your business and you in turn make it a priority to implement.

Josh

I spoke at the Forrester Financial Services Conference in New York City this past summer. It was a particular pleasure for me because I also got a chance to hear Walt Bettinger, Charles Schwab’s new CEO, describe how his firm utilized Net Promoter in its remarkable turnaround.
I had already heard pieces of the story from a variety of sources. Schwab began describing its client loyalty strategy and reporting its Net Promoter results to stock market analysts several years ago, and the press had picked up on what the company was doing. But this was the first time I had heard the entire story told in a public setting. Walt reviewed the dark days of 2004-2005, when he was president of Schwab’s retail business. Schwab was losing share. Its economics were collapsing. Pundits were predicting that the firm would not survive as an independent. Chairman and founder Chuck Schwab felt compelled to replace his CEO and personally lead the turnaround effort. The company’s Net Promoter Score at this time was negative 35%!

In its 2006 annual report, Schwab described how loyalty formed a cornerstone of its philosophy: “We want individual investors to feel so good about their investing outcomes—and their entire experience with Schwab—that they recommend us to their friends and family.” Walking the talk, Schwab’s leaders developed a reliable monthly NPS for each branch and began holding branch mangers accountable for their ranking. Bettinger himself personally interviewed scores of detractors and defectors to understand the root causes of their unhappiness. He insisted that bad profits (in the form of infuriating account fees) be eliminated over the next 24 months. Schwab became a founding member of our NPS Loyalty Forum and augmented these quarterly best-practice sessions with a series of internal conferences on NPS called Schwab-fests. The company integrated NPS into employee training. It created an employee engagement/loyalty process with NPS. The list goes on and on.

The results are impressive. By the summer of 2007, Schwab’s NPS had improved by more than 50 points to +23%. Its stock price surged, and it became a growth company once again (revenue had dropped at a compound annual rate of 5% between 2000 and 2004). If anyone has heard of another turnaround of such impressive dimensions, I hope they will leave a response after this blog entry.

This has served us well in the pas but I am a strong believer that focusing on specific verticals in the second half of 2009 into 2010 will allow all managed service providers to maintain growth. I am not suggesting abandoning general managed services but rather adding vertical specialization to your list of tricks, I mean services.

As you make the decision to provide services focused on a specific vertical it is important to do some homework and figure out where the money is. For example President Obama is busy passing legislature that will refund doctors money in order to move their medical records to an electronic medical records system. The law requires all doctors to conform to this standard by a specific date.

That alone should get you thinking about how you can take advantage of opportunities like this. Education is another place that will see money flowing in from the new administration. Have you started thinking about these and other verticals you might be able to use to advance your business?

As I think about launching our verticals I realize there are specific items we will need to cover such as:

• Knowing the industry language – if you cannot talk the talk you will not get through the door
• Knowing the 3rd party apps – once you can talk the talk you best be able to walk the walk by knowing the 3rd party application players in the specific vertical and how to support and work with them.
• Sales materials – once you know the language and the players you need to get yourself out there as an expert. Find the trade shows, vendors, and organizations that already have access to your audience and get in the door with them.
• Regulatory requirements – make sure you can answer the questions about compliance in the industry. Either develop the expertise or partner with someone who has it and can work alongside you while servicing the client.

If you get these four things right and you are in a vertical industry that is spending money you will surely increase your expected growth for 2009 significantly over remaining a general managed services play.

What verticals strategies are working for you that you would be willing to share?

Josh

I often find that when I am frustrated someone is not doing what I want them to be doing or they are not doing a task how I would expect them to do it the reason is often because I have not clearly outlined my expectations for the person I have delegated the task to.

These are some good guidelines to keep in mind from the folks at e-myth:

If you keep doing all the little daily tasks that you’ve always done, then you’ll forever be trapped doing them and never free up the time to work on your business. If letting go of these tasks is a bit daunting (and sometimes it is, especially if you’ve always done it and have your particular way of doing it) then take gradual steps.

First, identify a task that you want to delegate.

Document the correct way to perform this task, step by step, including the quality control standards for each step. (At E-Myth we call this type of system document an Action Plan.)

Clearly specify the expected results of the delegated task. Give information on what, why, when, who, where and how.

Have someone follow your Action Plan. Maintain open lines of communication. Don’t micro-manage, but make sure that you are kept in the loop on progress and performance. Then revise your document until you are both comfortable with it.

Delegate the responsibility. When the new system document is ready, provide it to the employee responsible for that task, train them on how to successfully run this “system” and insert a copy of this process document into your company’s Operations Manual.

Repeat these steps on every task you wish to delegate.

Delegation is a critical component in the development of a business that is balanced and inclusive. It will help you discover the natural place for yourself, your managers and your staff.

Now that we have talked about listening to your customers regularly we need to talk about what to do with the information.

If you are running surveys and asking for feedback as frequently as suggested in my last blog post you will need a process for reviewing customer feedback and reacting to it.

There is not much worse than asking customers for feedback and then doing nothing about the feedback you receive. At a minimum your system needs to acknowledge to the customer that you have received the feedback – especially the constructive feedback - and what they should expect.

In our system we reach out to unhappy clients to let them know the immediate steps we are going to take in order to ensure the same issues do not recur in the future. The most important part of this reach out is that we do not wait to have the answer in order to make contact. We will often reach out to let the client know we received their feedback; appreciate their feedback, and the steps we are taking to find the answer for a permanent fix. If you are always waiting to find the best permanent answer you can leave a client in the dark feeling like they wasted the effort in providing you the feedback.

Once you have a client feedback loop in place you also need to develop a system for regular evaluation of the feedback you receive. Looking for trends in the feedback you receive allows you to address root process, staffing, or systems problems that could be costing you business.

I suggest putting a process in place where you and your service leadership team review trends in feedback monthly, quarterly, semi annually, and annually. You should have a way to document trends that are identified, corrective actions taken and the results of the actions.

Let me know what you are doing to keep in touch and react to your customers voice.

Josh

For those of you who read our blog regularly you know Mike spends a lot of time thinking about and laying out his goals and encourages everyone else to do so.

In thinking about my personal development and my team’s personal development this evening I came across Tony Robbins classic Personal Power and was reminded of his success formula:

The Ultimate Success Formula

1. Know what you want
2. Know why you want it
3. Take massive action
4. Change your approach if you are not getting the results you want

It seems so simple when you read it and in fact these steps are simple. I use the word simple rather than easy very purposely here.

If it were easy to keep a focus on these steps in all the important areas of life we all would be successful beyond our dreams but it is not easy. It is putting a simple formula like this into practice that most people struggle with.

I am just as guilty as the next guy when it comes to not executing so please don’t feel as if I am preaching here. For me life is always too busy, there is always another priority that needs my attention, always something else going on, and so I do not execute with the level of clarity I would like to on my own personal development.

I am interested to know what is working for other out there. Feel free to comment here or shoot me an email.

Josh

One of the best tools we have used for developing talent is the simple process of role playing. We set aside an hour and a half a week for our key service employees to get into a room and role play customer interactions. We set the teams up in groups of three with one person playing the role of CTO, one person playing the role of client, and the third person silently observing and taking notes.

It is amazing what starts to surface when you start this process. You find yourself saying things like “why would you say that to a client” and “I thought you knew this inside and out”. The reality is often that you never gave your people exact instructions on how to behave in every situation so they are often just doing their best, even if it is off base from what you want.

In our role playing we focus a lot on constructive feedback. It is a strange analogy that we draw for our team but it is like American Idol. I assume you have seen this show and if you have not you should watch it because it is great. I tell our team that we all have to put our feelings aside and realize that all the feedback we receive, although it can be hard to hear, will make us a better team in the long run. I tell them to Simon Cowell each other and they are not doing anyone any favors if they Paula Abdul someone.

Now you may be asking yourself what the hell I am talking about here. If you have seen the show you know Simon has the reputation of being a bit of a dick. But if you watch frequently you realize that he is just honest and straightforward with his feedback giving people real substantive criticism to think about and use to their advantage. On the other hand no matter how bad you are Paula will find something nice to say and tell you that you are great so as to not hurt your feelings.  In our role playing we are not helping each other if we pull a Paula and we are providing great value if we Simon Cowell each other. Strange but it seems to resonate with people when explained this way.

We have started to get into such a good rhythm that this weekly role play meeting is known as the worst meeting that will make you great at your job. The worst in that no matter how well you prepare your topic you are going to be scrutinized and have things to work on. Great because you have the opportunity to take direct feedback and use it to get better at what you do.

I strongly suggest finding the time to do these roll playing session with your team as you look to develop your internal talent.

Josh