Why?
Yep, I know, that is a fair question. Why might you find value in hiring me to help you out? Especially since you know a whole heck of a lot more than I do about your company’s operations, niche, differentiators, philosophy, composition, personality and so on and so on. You also may know a heck of a lot more about your (our) industry than I do. You may know more about your local market than I do. However, consider these points……..
1. You are very busy and find it hard to get to important things. You know how to do them but just cannot get it done. I speak your language. I can get up and running quickly and take on projects that you want to get done but cannot quite get to.
3. When leaders are close to their operations, they are also close to their team members. Closeness breeds difficulty in making hard decisions and engaging in uncomfortable conversations. You may just need some help in bringing back your objectivity.
4. During a successful business’s lifetime, it should always be evolving, growing to new heights and thereby treading on new ground. You may go from a mom and pop operation in the den of your home, to a small office operation with 6 employees, to a larger operation with 25 employees and then perhaps you add a couple of satellite offices. Each new step brings new challenges and is a learning curve. Perhaps I have been some of the places you are going.
5. Every executive has certain areas in which they excel and other areas in which they are weaker. Perhaps some of my areas of high expertise are different than yours. What may I be able to bring to you? My areas of highest expertise include:
1. Business analytics and management.
Corporate Budgeting – The owner of one of the largest and most successful businesses in Seattle once called me out by writing that I created amazingly “accurate and detailed budgets.” The CFO of one of the largest management companies in the country regularly did the same. There is a lot to discuss in the statement “accurate and detailed” budgets. First is the fact that it is the adjective “detailed” that begets the adjective “accurate”. That is key number one. But truthfully, there is really no such thing as an accurate budget. I mean accurate compared to what? Yes, a budget can be completed without any mathematical flaws in it and could be considered “accurate”, but to my way of thinking it is the operations which make the budget accurate, and they come after the budgeting work is done. Could we more accurately say that I create accurate and detailed operations? Indeed, neither of the executives who lauded my budgeting work did so in analyzing my budget, but rather it was in analyzing my budget to actual comparative reports each period………and later seeing the budgeting process that allowed me to run an “accurate and detailed” operation.
Let me share another quote that is analogous to this. A friend of mine once said that his GPS was amazingly accurate. He said that he always gets to the destination at the exact time that the GPS tells him he will get there, no matter how fast or slow he drives! Well my accurate financial performance in business uses a similar system to a GPS, except that the GPS really cheats! It reassesses along the way and says, “oops, I said I would get him there at 8:05, I will never make that, I will change my answer to 8:06.
You can’t do it that way in business, that’s cheating! Rather if you are behind schedule in business, you need to change your route (yeah GPS, didn’t think of that, did you?). You cannot simply say, “Oh wait, my budget said we were going to run a net profit of $2,000,000. We are in line to only make half of that. I think I will change that to $1,000,000.” Rather, one must change their operational processes to get back in line with the $2,000,000 plan. The way I have been able to run multi-million-dollar budgets to almost always land within 2 or 3% of plan (and one amazing, and lucky year, within a few hundred bucks) is to reassess operations regularly, daily, generally. But in order to do that, well, you do need a budget with enough detail to allow you to make adjustments, and you must have the discipline to do so! If your budget for January includes only basic details such as; Management Fee Income = $220,000, Association Manager Payroll = $52,000, Educational Expense = $1,900, you cannot adjust operations to your budget. But if the $220,000 management fee income is driven by a list of accounts and scheduled fees, if the manager payroll of $52,000 is driven by a schedule of each manager and his/her salary, and education expense is driven by a schedule of classes, attendees and prices, you can adjust operations and meet your budget every time, unless there was a catastrophic event.
I know, it sounds like a lot of work, and it is, but only one time, when you set up the system. After that, it really takes little more time to create a useful, purposeful budget than to create the much more common useless budget which serves no operational purpose. Now you might be saying to yourself, “Dang, that sounds great Jim, I want to do that! But Jim, I am too buried in what I have to do to be able to do what I want to do. So what do I do Jim?” Answer: Well, I don’t know, maybe you could get someone to help you. But you would have to figure out who that might be (hint; perhaps someone who you mentioned three times in your last statement)
2. Marketing / Sales
Are you generating enough leads? How do you know? If not, what should you do?
Are you turning enough leads into opportunities? How do you know? If not, what should you do?
Are you closing enough opportunities? How do you know? If not, what should you do?
I served as the chair of the first marketing committee for one of the largest association management companies in the country. I did so soon after it’s creation via merger of six companies. This was a great learning experience in that it allowed me to answer some of the above questions because I could get a comparative of six varying and largely dissimilar approaches.
There is a great piece about this on my blog page on this website. It is entitled “Capturing New Clients”.
3. Employee productivity, satisfaction and retention
In this industry the employee is golden, particularly the client facing members of your teams. Team retention has been a large focus for me as I spent most of my career in growth mode, so we needed to both retain the current staff and keep adding staff. I started with a team of 6 and built to a team of 120, so that is a lot of work on both retention and addition. As important as maintaining an adequate number of team members is keeping them productive, because an unproductive team member is worse than no team member at all. I would love to share my strategies in these areas.
4. Client retention (and a subsidiary skill, problem solving) – Is your client retention good? How do you know? Is it as good as your competition? How do you know? Well you can ask them, I suppose. But when I have tried this, I have become distraught because no matter how good mine is, theirs is better. If I share my retention rate with another company and it is 90%, theirs is 95%. If mine is 95%, theirs is 99. If mine is 99, theirs is 105%! Say what?! The point is that this is a poor process and there are much better ways to compare your retention to your top competitors’. During highly competitive times, I tracked my rates and those of my competitors and it only took 30 minutes a quarter, well after I took the time to set up a strong system using statistical sampling.
Client retention has many components. I am not a big believer in giving out lunches and talking your unhappy clients off of the ledge, slapping high fives with my team and calling it a day. If that is your process, well, they will be out there again very soon. How many times have you saved an account, felt great to have done so……for a while, but felt really bad again when you got fired 3 months later (well maybe 6, but it’s usually somewhere in that range)……unless you have addressed the source of their discontent Usually if a client is unhappy, there is a problem. I have spent years in problem solving, both in the field and in the classroom taking classes and seminars in studying the process. In order to really solve a problem, one must determine what the problem REALLY is. Then find a solution. The solutions must fit the problem, so the first step is vital. Solving the wrong problem is no help at all. . Well, I am ok with that as one step in a process which includes fixing the problem(s) that put them out on the ledge. Oh but that is not enough. The entire process has these components:
1) Determine the problem
2) Determine the pervasiveness of the problem
3) Find the solution
4) Implement the solution (across the original point of manifestation and all other areas where it exists)
5) Confirm the effectiveness of the solution
6) Create a system to measure and retain the solution.
So, if you have a problem with one association, it is vital to see if the same problem exists with other clients and to have an ONGOING solution, rather than just a patch of the problem. I know, sometimes in our busy business we end up just sticking fingers in the holes in the dike.
5. Business applications Expertise
I am expert in the use of Excel for the solutions we typically expect of Excel, budgeting, business planning and forecasting, tracking data, etc. However, there are many purposes that most don’t think of, which I have employed over the years. Did you know that Excel can be used to predict the weather for a particular date 5 years from now? Did you know that Excel can tell you what your pricing strategy is, even if you didn’t know you had one? Ah yes, Excel, my favorite thing in life. Sorry honey…..family, friends.
I am expert in the creation of powerful Power Point presentations, including graphics, animation, transitions, sounds and slide layering. Was it not for Excel, Power Point may be my favorite thing in life. Again, sorry everyone.
I have some experience in HTML and VBA programming.
So, there you have it. Oh, except my fee.
Pricing: $250.00 per hour
Discounts apply for quantifiable prepaid jobs with a duration of more than 15 billing hours and greater discounts for even larger projects (up to 33%). If you think you could benefit from any of these services, click the button and let’s get going.