Here's Another Strategic Plan

Outhire and out-train your competition.

Field the best team of capable and engaged people.

Here's one Strategic Plan

Read and listen to what smart people have to say. 

Surround yourself with a diversity of smart capable (and some experienced) people.

Act on interesting ideas.

Find the ones that work and incorporate them into your business.

Stop doing things that don’t work well.

Designing Value Into Your Business

“Only one company can be the cheapest.  All others must use design.” – Rodney Fitch, Fitch+Co.

What can you design into your customer output that your customer will like better?  Experience, color, grace, time, convenience, result, acknowledgment, happiness, quantity, bonus…..

Energy is the currency of high-performance

From “15 Secrets Successful People Know About” –

Energy is everything.  

You can’t manage time, but you can manage energy.  People want to get more done with less stress.  

The secret is to manage your energy.

Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

Rest and sleep enough.  Eat well.  Exercise your body and recover.

Energy – spend and recover it well.

All great performers rely on positive rituals to manage their energy and regulate their performance.  The more exacting the challenge and the greater the pressure, the more rigorous our rituals need to be.

Don't forget to rest

Busy people try to cram a lot of stuff in a day. 

They often sacrifice sleep, and quiet time to get more work done.

The irony is that their focus, energy, and ability to make good decisions and get things done suffers.  They are also grouchy and more pessimistic and not having as much fun.

Enough rest and sleep will help you get more done when you do work, and you’ll be happier, healthier, and live longer.

You likely can’t get more sleep in the morning.  You have to discipline yourself to shut off the screens and devices and go to bed earlier.

Time Management

The best time management technique is prioritization.  

Work on the most important (not urgent) task that would be the most valuable when completed.

The best way to save time is to not do something at all (yourself), saving time for more important things.

Single Handling

Effective people who use time well touch things as few times as possible – hopefully just once.  

They don’t pick up a piece of paper and read it and make a note and put in a pile to act on later.  They act now and be done with it.

They don’t read an email and respond with a question to the sender, only to start a days-long back-and-forth email chain, as one question begets another from the other side.  They pick up the phone (maybe a Facetime call), have a conversation, make a decision, and move on.

They have less balls in the air and things to move forward a painful and slow small step each day.

If you have a lot to do, all the more reason to put issues to bed – one by one by one.

Bold moves

When you started your business, it was a bold move. 

Now that you have been running it a while, you may need more bold moves.

Strategy, people, place, offering…only you can call the moves that lead you into the future and make a big difference.

“There is no path, until you walk it.”

Plunder

I listened to this audiobook called “Plunder – Private Equity’s plan to pillage America”.

Wow.  What a title.

While I sense the author goes a bit too far at times in being critical of basic smart business decisions, I found the book on point in its basic idea.  Private Equity thinks short term.  And when you think short term you only care about the money, not the work (product), your customers, your reputation (relationships), or your employees.  Bad things come from short-term thinking.  But PE firms isolate themselves from loss, liability, and blame with debt, other people’s money, non-compete agreements, and lawyers – and even help from the government.

I feel like I am crossing my own line by going negative like this on Think Daily – but I can’t be silent anymore.  I’ve seen and heard too much.  Private equity is not business – it’s business manipulation. 

Does it provide an exit for business owners who have reached their retirement age or the limit of their ability to grow any further?  Yes.  But the ones left behind will likely suffer, and when the business is flipped a few years later, then new leaders don’t even know the employee’s names – if they are even still there.  And when everybody is new and there is nothing to fight for, customers suffer.

Have PE firms done any good?  For some – but win-win-win is not in their playbook.  If you hurt people, it doesn’t make you a good person if you helped a few others.  At least that’s the way I think of it.  Winning financially at the expense of customers and employees is not winning.

Check it out and let me know if it matches your real-world experience.  It sure matches mine.

Delaying gratification

One requirement for entrepreneurs to be successful is to be able to delay gratification.

Short-term thinking will not get you there.

Long-term thinking is where you make investments to make tomorrow better; and next year and the next ten years, and even the next 20.

If you want to spend and play all you can today, and you can’t delay gratification, you are not going to build a great business.