Business Transition Crisis

It's good to be back after an intense conference and learning period in Spain followed by a few days of rest and relaxation.

Certainly helps with one of my success habits, waking up early (by having a six hour time difference).

I read Wayne Vanwyck's book Business Transition Crisis - Plan Your Succession Now and Beat the Biggest Business Selloff In History.

Wayne is an acquaintance and friend so I might be somewhat biased.

This book targets the business owners and some of the points in the book I think are more applicable to small and family-owned businesses. Still, he made many excellent points.

The one thing that i definitely agree on is he suggested setting goals and planning. Success and succession has a lot to do with planning, which makes total sense.

Vanwyck is a big advocate of E-mything you business. This essentially means having process defined in your business and having everything broken down and documented. This makes it easier for a buyer who can then feel the business can run without you (and this is a good idea in any event).

He had an excellent chapter on planning what the entrepreneur who sells the business should do after they have left the business. Selling the business leaves a huge hole and part of success in transitioning involves what are you going to fill the hole with. Again, this is all planning.

There's a chapter on advisors and I have a healthy skepticism towards many consultants and often fear there are actually conflicts of interest because many advisors are paid and aren't truly in your corner. I do believe in taking advice and listening, but it needs to be filtered.

I think the best transition would be if you can find someone who truly cares about you and the outcome for you and can advise from that angle as opposed to worrying about getting paid. Of course this doesn't mean you don't need other experts like accountants, lawyers, advisors and possibly business brokers.

One interesting thing I found in my years of buying businesses is I often liked buying a business which I didn't feel was particularly well run because then I felt that I could make some changes to make it profitable. Some businesses I've looked at seem that the owner/operator is so good and so hands-on that I think I'd lose much of the value when I buy the business because I simply wouldn't be able to keep doing what they do.

Take Their Breath Away Service

I will be happy to be back from Spain today. It seems like a long time to be away. My ToDo list has grown and needs some action. Perhaps I should read my blog post on how to handle too many things to to.

One of the impressive speakers at the YPO conference was David Suzuki. He seems to be a nice person with a level head. He understands that small steps can make a big environmental impact (like eating one vegetarian meal per week). He also understands that economics drive behavior so the best way to create behavior change is to change the economics (make things cost more or less)

I recently read Take Their Breath Away: How Imaginative Service Creates Devoted Customers
by Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson.

This is a book with a number of short stories about highly successful companies that have been imaginative in their customer service to create a major differentiation.

The book starts with twelve different strategies that can take people's breath away.

1. Animation

2. Reinvention

3. Decoration

4. Camouflage

5. Concierge

6. Partnership

7. Cult-Like

8. Luxury

9. Air

10. Air Defense

11. Scout's Honor

12. Firefighter

Animation is having the positive attitude that is somewhat unusual in dealing with customers.

The following spirit of greatness pledge sums it up.

"I promise to be in charge of my attitude each and every day, to let no one affect that attitude at any time, and to be a contagious spirit of greatness-- 24/7, 365 days a year!"

Under reinvention, Andy Grove sums this up. "Breakthroughs come from an instinctive judgement of what customers might want if they knew to think about it"

Decoration is simply setting yourself apart by having better window designs, layout, unique surroundings, logos, business cards, etc.

A list of the following are:

-Theme

-Sense

-Simple Sense

-Comfort

-Function

I'm not going to elaborate on these, you'll have to read the book to get that.

The book uses a series of vignettes about real people, real businesses that have set themselves apart by uniqueness in customer service. What I like about the theory is that many of the uniquenesses don't seem to cost much but do help differentiate the business.

It also reinforced focus. Often one service differentiator was all it took.

Virgin - Sir RIchard Branson - Live

I am at a YPO event in Barcelona, Spain. Lots of interesting seminars. Lots of stats. EG 40% of the world bandwidth is used by Youtube. I have not yet done anything on Youtube although I have done most other social medias like this blog, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and even a Tumblr. Sounds time intensive but I automated it. The updates for Twitter are the same ones I use for all the others. I even save those updates under Motivational Business Quotations and the same thing under Jim Estill's Quotes and Article Picks.

The keynote speaker yesterday was Richard Branson. More impressive stats - 250 companies. Has never let one fail because reputation is everything. He is the branding king. He understands consumer behavior and branding.

He comes across as humble, real and "normal". I even saw him jogging along the beach after the session.

He used his Dyslexia and ADD to his advantage.

The big take away I got from his session was I should delegate more. He spends 4-8 weeks immersing himself in a business then he hires a leader and lets that person run it.

I had just read his autobiography - Losing My Virginity (thanks to Russ Salo - GPS to go). The book elaborated more on his struggles to get Virgin Atlantic up and running in the face of unethical competitive practices by British Airways. And the cash crisis of his early business that lead to him selling Virgin Music. He is now worth $2.5B according to Forbes so he did manage to do fine anyways.

He did speak of the responsibility of wealth. He also spoke of the value of being a good listener.

Success Habits and Why we do Time Management

I am always perplexed when I hear someone say they are not interested in Time Management. The reasons they cite usually has to do with the fact that they do not want to work that hard and are more interest in having fun, relaxing, or having leisure.

If this is truly the case, then they have missed the whole point in Time Management. Many of the efficiency tips (and management has more to do with efficiency than anything) allow people to be more productive and get more done.

It seems to me if someone were interested in spending more time on leisure, relaxing or anything else, they would want to get through their other tasks and chores in an efficient manner so they can go on about relaxing better.

I know I tend to be fairly driven and perhaps that sends the wrong message to people who think that if they start some time management tricks they will just start working too hard.

Time management is not about working harder, it’s all about working smarter so you can do what you actually want to do.

My success habits of the day are:

1. Do the worst thing first thing. I choose to do this both first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch. This has been the best thing for getting items off my plate, breaking through procrastination and not having the stress of having things hang over me.

2. Know you goals and link the action items to your goals. If something is not important enough to be on your goals, should you really be doing it?

3. Leave the room a little bit neater than you left it. I don't spending a lot of time cleaning out my car or any other room for that matter and the simple habit of leaving the room a little neater than I came into it allows me to keep the clutter and the paper a little bit neater (of course sometimes I have to go in and out of a room a few times to get things neat).

4. Be healthy. In reality this one is because a lot of time management has to do with energy, not so much time and being healthy gives you energy. If you are not healthy it sure creates a huge elephant in the room that needs to be dealt with first.

Good luck on your time management.

Business Book Review - Contagious Leadership

I recently read John Hersey's great book called Creating Contagious Leadership - 9 Habits that Inspire a Leadership Culture.

I love the concept of contagious leadership and I figure even if someone doesn't deliberately go about trying to be contagious, the leader definitely will be. I have seen in organizations where the leaders is slow and lack a customer service ethic and this tends to permeate throughout the organization. I've also seen cases where the leader is quick, responsive, has a high work ethic and that tends to also translate through the organization.

The gist of Hersey's message is that by deliberately trying to be contagious, the leader can multiply their efforts. The book has a number of practical ideas on how to do this.

Some of these habits include:

1. Spotlighting (This is shining the spotlight in areas that are good)
2. Vibrant Communication (Communication is always a big deal in any organization)

3. Permission Mentoring (one of my favorites). I've always been a believer in coach, training and mentoring people and have often said I want people who are coachable, but what I guess what I was really was looking for was permission mentoring, where people actually give permission to be mentored.

The book is short and to the point, well written and easy to read. I would recommend it to any leader.

Another short book I read last night was Positively Quit! Manual by Cassius Cheong. It is about quitting smoking (fortunately I never started so have never had to quit). Why would I read it? He sent it to me, curiosity and it was short. It was a fast read. It covered all the usual stuff you would expect - the reasons, other methods, tricks etc. Smoking is a terrible habit - read this book if you smoke.

Purity Products

I started doing a project for Purity Products to help them with their SEO.

Purity Products sells evidence-based nutritional supplements. They even wrote a book called The Best Kept Secrets to Healthy Aging - Your Guide to Better Health and Longevity.

I'm about as passionate about health and longevity as I am on business and marketing, so the project seemed like it was right down my alley. That said, I generally do not take supplements and believe that my best route to health is eating right. So I was somewhat skeptical when I picked up the book.

I was pleased that the book talks not only about the various supplements that could be used to supplement health like Vitamin D and CoQ10 but it talked about general health. They also talked about a product that is good for runners called ha joint.

There was a whole chapter on Dietary Choices - Establishing a Foundation For Health, which is how I choose to do it. I was also pleased to see a chapter on "Exercise, health and longevity" as I have longed believe that exercise is a critical part.

There's a chapter on "Sleep - Vital to Health and Healing". This is one that I was hoping they would develop a pill so that we wouldn't need.

It was an interesting book and gave me more insights into nutritional supplements and also reinforced a lot of what I knew about being healthy.

Why Time Management

I’m always perplexed when I hear someone say they are not interested in Time Management. The reasons they cite usually has to do with the fact that they don’t want to work that hard and are more interest in having fun, relaxing, or having leisure.

If this is truly the case, then they’ve missed the whole point in Time Management. Many of the efficiency tips (and management has more to do with efficiency than anything) allow people to be more productive and get more done.

It seems to me if someone were interested in spending more time on leisure, relaxing or anything else, they’d want to get through their other tasks and chores in an efficient manner so they can go on about relaxing better.

I know I tend to be fairly driven and perhaps that sends the wrong message to people who think that if they start some time management tricks they’ll just start working too hard.

Time management is not about working harder, it’s all about working smarter.

My success habits of the day are:

1. Do the worst thing first thing. I choose to do this both first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch. This has been the best thing for getting items off my plate, breaking through procrastination and not having the stress of having things hang over me.

2. Know you goals and link the action items to your goals. If something is not important enough to be on your goals, should you really be doing it?

3. Leave the room a little bit neater than you left it. I don't spending a lot of time cleaning out my car or any other room for that matter and the simple habit of leaving the room a little neater than I came into it allows me to keep the clutter and the paper a little bit neater (of course sometimes I have to go in and out of a room a few times to get things neat).

4. Be healthy. In reality this one is because a lot of time management has to do with energy, not so much time and being healthy gives you energy and if you're not healthy it sure creates a huge elephant in the room that needs to be dealt with first.

Good luck on your time management.

Changing topics. I love marketing and SEO so I read Daniel Scocco's eBook on making money from blogging. Scocco is one the leaders in internet marketing and SEO. His eBook was a fast and interesting (for me) read. Much of it I knew but some I did not.

Most of it I agreed with - some I did not (like do not use your name as the URL of the blog and of course I use www.jimestill.com).

His big points included being focussed on one topic(I definitely agree with owning a niche). Passion - definite must to make a blog go. Focus on only one blog (don't spread yourself too broadly). And his other totally valid point - focus on quality. Good content is what it is all about.