12 Competencies That Change Everything

There are 12 areas, which take twelve weeks or three months to cover. I will cover the first 4 here today. These tools will help you bulletproof your business. Take your palm pilot, day timer or calendar and set a time and date for 1 hour for each of the next 4 weeks. 

Here are the dates and times you need to set aside:

THIS WEEKEND or BEFORE THE END OF MONDAY MARCH 18th
Friday March 22nd
Friday March 29th
Friday April 5th (this part requires a little more than 1 hour)

Here is Week 1:

Goals TODAY, If you don't do this today or before Monday it may never get done!

Take a blank sheet of paper and at the top, on the right, I want you to write down the word "GOALS." Under your goals I want you to write down the gross revenue you would like to be at three years from now. Under that, write the personal income you would like to be drawing from the business.

Now write down how many hours per week you would like to work while making that money.

Now write down how many weeks vacation you would like to take. 

Now at the top of the page, on the left, write down "Current."

Under that write down the current numbers for each of those things:

1. Gross revenues.

2. Personal Revenues.

3. Hours worked.

4. Vacations taken.... 

Now write: ACTION PLAN.

There are only eight things that drive any business. Set goals for each of these areas every 12 weeks and watch how you SYSTEMATICALLY improve your business. Here they are:

Marketing:

• Strategy (thoroughly explained shortly)

• Capital (Human, Intellectual, and Financial)

• Business Model (shape what you want it to be)

• Relationships (Are you capitalizing on every relationship, from your clients to your vendors, to your friends, associates and business contacts)

• Distribution Channels (this is an enormous asset, more on this later)

• Products and Services (create constant improvement in this area)

• Procedures and Processes, Policies (THIS is what makes a business that runs without you)

Once every 12 weeks, you and your staff are going to have a goal-writing workshop. In each of these sessions you are going to break down the steps to achieving your three-year goal into three-month action plans. So set goals for gaining clients, set goals for specific marketing efforts, what you'll do and when you'll do it, etc. 
Set goals for improvement in each of these eight drivers above. But I'm going to break it down even more for you. Keep reading.

The Biggest Secret in Doing a Company Turn-around:
Whereas most companies in trouble focus all their energy on problems, rather than solutions. An entrepreneur in trouble will dwell so much on the problems (worrying), that their subconscious directs them more to problems than to solutions. 

So if you're in trouble: Put a heavier focus on solutions than on problems. Goals are a powerful device in any company.

Ok, Week 2: Time Management - On or before March 22nd

You will never achieve what you want to achieve if you do not manage your time effectively. People get swept away, reacting to the life they created, and they stop creating a better and better life, or business. So once every 12 weeks, you are going to focus your meeting on maximizing and saving time. 

Do you have a list of things that each person is supposed to get done each day? Do you have special projects that you are taking on in small incremental chunks, and are there lists of how and when this time is going to be spent. You know what they are. The big things that will really make the difference but aren't in process right now. Studies show that only 20%% of your time is spent on the things that actually produce results. Hence, if you can focus 80%% of your time on high-results-producing activities, you can virtually quadruple productivity. 

So the first competency, Goal Setting, is where you set up a three-month plan, and the second competency, Time Management, is where you break down the big plans into daily plans. 

Do you agree with everything I've said so far? If you read all this and do nothing, than you're fooling yourself, because this is all based upon what the best businesses do. If you want to continue to work hard for your business, instead of getting that business to work hard for you, then, by all means, ignore the things that have worked for every single company who has applied them. 

To build a great organization, you have to start taking all the goals and plans and create structure in your organization. One of the key traits of very successful people is that they use what we call The three P's. That's the third competency.

Week 3: Planning, Policies and Procedures. On or before March 29th

McDonald's in Harlem runs just as smoothly as McDonald's in Beverly Hills, because there is no area that does not have the procedures down to the letter. What's more, the employee turnover rate at MacDonald's is 200%% per year, but it doesn't matter because everything is so well spelled out that new people can be put into the system and function at an optimum level very quickly. 

If you ever want to have a business that can function without you, or replace staff with people who enter the business at peak performance, right from the start, you must have excellent policies, procedures and plans. So once every 12 weeks, you will take a look at another area of the business and see how well you can apply the three P's. 

Here is a standard procedure right now: It is now company policy that each person in the business must write a "to do" list at the beginning of the month, which will be broken into weekly action plans, which will end up as daily to do lists. 

With a bit of focus and thought I am sure that you and your staff can come up with some more ideas.

This next competency will do more for you becoming the pre-eminent leader in your market, than any of the other competencies:

Week 4; Strategy Vs. Tactics THIS IS FOR THE WEEKEND OF APRIL 6 & 7

So finally I am going to talk about marketing. But before I begin, we need to break down marketing into several categories. The first is to really understand the difference between strategy and tactics. 

Strategy means that you have determined, in advance, an ultimate goal you would like to achieve for each tactic. 

Tactics are the things you do to achieve your goal. A tactic is a marketing effort like; a yellow page ad, a newsletter, a speaking engagement, a sales call, a trade show, a newspaper ad, a meeting with a new client, etc. 

But before you deploy one of these tactics, you have to determine the ultimate objective you would like to achieve. For example, if you have an interaction with a customer (like a sales call) and we ask you what do you want to achieve, most would simply say: "make a sale." 

I challenge you that you can achieve a lot more. Maybe you want to build in a pre-emptive strategy for "dis-empowering" the competition. Maybe you want to build in an automatic referral program or plant the seed to generate more referrals. 

Maybe you want to arm all your clients with better information; Every client you have is a potential salesperson for your organization. What do you want them to say and have you planted all the right strategic positioning into your tactical interface.

The point is that if you're not THINKING this one through, your tactics do not MAXIMIZE on the opportunity at hand. 

Of course, once you "strategize" on what you expect from each tactic, now you need to create an actual policy or procedure to implement that idea with piercing effectiveness at the tactical level. 

Also, your tactics should be working together to achieve the ultimate goal or outcome that you want. Most companies do not look at their tactics as an integrated program. 

For example, let's say that I could put all of your best potential buyers all in a room all at once and then I could give you the opportunity to stand in front of them and make your best presentation to these people. This one single opportunity, if properly executed, could forever change your life. Or ruin it, if you are not effective.

Imagine, that you had all the time you needed and this incredible opportunity to tell all your best potential buyers exactly what you want them to know about you and your business. What would you say? Here are some things you should think about before you get in front of this group:

1. What is the long-term reputation you want and are you operating today in a way that is going to achieve that reputation? 

2. Exactly how do you want to be perceived?

3. What's different or better about how you do things over everyone else? Every company has something unique to offer, something that sets them apart... If you don't then you should have. You'd better think about it and make sure you are communicating it. So what's different about you?

In other words, what is the ultimate position and perception you want the market to have about you and your products or services? And our question to you now is: Does your marketing today reflect the ultimate reputation or position you want in your market? Have you really thought about this? 

If you have great strategies, great strategic positioning and your tactics are always deploying a little strategy, than all your tactics begin to add up to something. Your tactics work harder and smarter for the same money if they deploy strategy every time you use a tactic. Same money, bigger results if you're THINKING and PLANNING before you execute. 

In order to really make marketing effective, you need to really sit down and think about what you want to say. So, as a subset of this competency, we want you to write down: "BUILD MY STORY." I want you to take a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and sit down and think through all the questions I just asked you so that you can tell your story to that big room of people and get the majority of them to want to do business with you. 

The better your story is, the better all of your marketing is going to be. 

Once every 12 weeks, you are going to look at all the ways you make contact with clients and potential clients. Look to see if you are deploying strategy with those tactics. Is part of your story, or all of your story, always being told in each of your tactics? Are you accomplishing the most you could accomplish from each of your tactics? 

In conclusion I hope this was not too profound or overwhelming. This newsletter forces me to review my company, skills and thoughts, just as it forces me to practice what I preach. Let me know if you enjoyed it, I would love to see how many of you read this far. Drop me a note at rob@comersio.com