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.
Every Monday night Mike and I play indoor soccer at the local indoor soccer place in Boulder.
Tonight our goalie mixed up the time of the game and was not there when the game started. About five minutes into the game we were already five goals down, not completely the fault of the field guy trying to tend the goal but certainly a different start than we would have had with our regular net minder.
As the first half went on it seemed to only get worse. We were unable to mount much offense and by the end of the half we were behind 3-9. This is such a large deficit in indoor soccer that the rules actually make the winning team play down one player if they are ahead by more than five goals, a bit like the slaughter rule back on the playground when you were a kid.
Going into the second half it was clear that some people on the team had given up and others on the team were rising to the challenge to try and turn the ship around. Instead of breaking the game down into smaller chunks that we could set our sights on winning the leaders on the team spoke of how to score in general on the opponent.
We started the second half with some hustle that quickly gave way to despair as some of our key players stopped running as hard and playing defense with as much heart as they normally would, and we had a lull across the team.
I have always had the competitive drive that does not allow me to quit. We could be down by 10 goals with a minute left and I would still be running my hardest, and giving my all to try to close the gap. I suppose it has something to do with the way that i was raised. Tonight I found myself throwing myself into the boards and clashing heads with the opponent in an attempt to pull within reach of victory. The problem I had to grapple with for one moment during the game was this tough:
Why should I bust my ass, risk being really sore tomorrow, and play my heart out when that guy, one of our better guys, is not running, changing up shifts, or even doing the basics that are required to participate in the game?
Thankfully I only thought this for a moment and the majority of the team had the fire in the belly to fight on to the final buzzer. While we did not win we did bring the game back within striking distance a few times and ultimately turned what could have been an embarrassing loss into a close game.
So what the heck does this have to do with my managed services company you must be asking.
Well the fact of the matter is that if you are like every other business in the world right now you are asking or even demanding that your people do more with less each day. Each and every day you need to have someone that drives the team forward. Someone that can light a light and get the team to follow them rather than cursing the darkness with the rest of the troops. This motivation to drive forward needs to come from the people on your leadership team and it needs to be so strong it is infectious.
The other important lesson from tonight’s game is that you need to be constantly communicating, focusing the team, and setting goals. It seems like an impossible goal to go out and win the game going into the second half, but it sure was possible to win the first five minutes. After the first five minutes we could have set the goal of winning the second five minutes with the ultimate goal of winning the half. By breaking it down like this it would have given us all the motivation to dig deep and keep playing hard rather than going through the motions which is what can happen when goals are not clear or appear unreachable.
You need to do the same thing in your company. It is great, no it is needed to have gig annual targets but it is important to reset the teams targets quarterly or even monthly when necessary to keep everyone laser focused and moving forward.
From a tough soccer game to running a business in tough times we all have to realize it is about returning to the basics, communicating, setting goals to keep the team aligned, and publically recognizing those that are playing their hearts out for the victory.
This is a question you should get in the habit of asking your key employees every week during you management huddle.
The power of asking this question is that it promotes an open and respectful work place where people are willing to bring frustrations to your attention. As Michael Gerber has taught us in emyth it is systems that fail not people. We need to make sure our people know that this is our philosophy in running the company so that they are comfortable bringing problems to your attention.
After asking the question do not dig into the solutions with the group but rather gather the issues, prioritize them, and then assign single point accountability to someone in the organization for resolving the issue.
We have recently started asking this question again in our weekly operations huddle and the results have already been impactful.
The title of this blog should not be “Have you implemented NPS” it should be “when did you implement NPS and what value have you seen from it”.
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.
In our six years as a managed service provider we have never specifically set out to provide services to any one vertical in particular. We have built strong services serving all verticals and ultimately claimed specific vertical knowledge by looking back at our client base and realizing we had a large group of clients in professional services, or non profit.
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?
