What can you be the Best in the World at doing?
September 7th, 2010
Think about strategy and marketing when you look at the following model:
What enables some companies to command the respect and loyalty of their customers, while others can’t find their niche and must continuously cut costs and retrench in their business? What are the dynamics of the market that let a company be a star for years and then suddenly slip from its leadership position?
“Value Disciplines” is the term used for three dynamic business leadership strategies – operational excellence, product leadership or customer intimacy – that companies effect to differentiate themselves and provide unmatched value to their customers. A Value Discipline strategy provides the context for a company to set its corporate vision and objectives, target its most profitable customers, and focus and align its functional departments.
Value Disciplines force a company to look outward and listen to the voices of its profitability: customers. Traditional marketing segmentation strategies group customers by geography, product mix or demographics. Value Disciplines, however, segment customers according to the product and service benefits which are most valuable to them. Based on research done by Treacy and Wiersema (the creators of this model), customers have three distinct value preferences:
• Best total cost
• Best product features
• Best total solution
Customers richly reward suppliers who they believe are uniquely positioned to provide the benefits that are most valuable to them. For example, customers who value the best total cost, no-hassles service, and speed of delivery will be most loyal to an Operationally Excellent supplier. A customer segment demanding state of the art product features will pay a premium price to a supplier who demonstrates Product Leadership. Finally, a customer segment that values a Customer Intimate supplier requires customized products, highly personalized services and will be less price sensitive.
Which one defines your business?
Thank You Board of Advisors!
September 3rd, 2010
We wanted to use today’s Blog post to thank our new team! We are honored to have 7 highly talented, professional and generous individuals agree to join our board of advisors. Over the past 4 months we have been recruiting exceptional men and women to fill roles on our board of advisors team.
We formed the board to be able to guide our high level decision making and company direction. Even though we are consultants we believe there is tremendous value in receiving a level of consultation and accountability ourselves. It is important to be able to receive outside perspective on our company at the macro and micro levels. Many things are difficult to see when you are operating in the day to day. It helps to receive outside opinion on the 30,000 foot view.
Our first meeting with the board is going to be in October and we are excited to kick off the next phase of growth with an excellent team. Thank you to our advisory team for volunteering for this position and helping us; we are truly grateful.
Designing the BEST Org Board for your Business Flow
September 1st, 2010
Want to know how to increase production, accountability, improve communications and reduce expenses? Look into how your organization is set up, how business flows and what each area is truly doing.
In 12 months we helped a business take their investment with us and create a return-on-investment of 30 times. We helped another client increase their top line by 10% and decrease their expenses by 35% in under 3 months.
We achieve these results by utilizing organization structure and change. When you break a business down into a system and process it becomes clear where the gaps and duplications are. Then we use our methods of change management to restructure the business to optimize performance.
Want to learn more about how we do this? Contact Us Today…Click Here!
How to Eliminate Employee Frustration
August 31st, 2010
There is a simple equation we use with clients to display the declining scale of why most employees are angry or frustrated at work. here it is simply put:
No Company Policies -> Leads to Employee Confusion -> Leads to Employee Resentment
Policy = a definite course of action adopted for the sake of expediency, facility, etc. And we will add…Communicated to all employees.
A company with policy has clarity on how things should be done or by what guidelines they should be followed. A policy could be something as simple as how to properly lock the office at the end of the business day. The policy is the method created by the owner or manager to guide employees to achieve a result in accordance with his/their expectations.
You can create policy around the way you want business to be run at your company. And when an issue arises with something that does not have a policy around it, that creates a great opportunity to develop a new one with the person who was doing the task.
The more your Team knows the rules of their game and how to play together, then it eliminates confusion about their job. Think about it this way: How would football look if the players got to make up the rules of the game as it went? We have these policies in place to gel our teams and level the playing field.
Should I Send Them A Bill?
August 30th, 2010
How many of you have spent too much time talking on the phone with a cell phone carrier due to an error they made? As an example of poor customer service, ineffective processes and misaligned organizational structure: I spent over 6 hours on the phone with AT&T Wireless to try and resolve the fall-out of a billing error they made. Let me example…
Our business is growing and my partner and I merged our person accounts into a business account in May. We were told that it would take 3-4 Days…It took 2.5 Months!!! During this madness we were getting too many bills and then not enough bills and it got to the point where mistakes were made and promises were not kept.
The true problem was that every time I called into AT&T to try to resolve the issue (again and again), I had to speak to a different person on the phone. So I had to explain the process more than 5 or 6 times and spent more that 6 hours on the phone trying to help solve an issue that remains unresolved. The notes on my account did not truly reflect the details of each conversations, the promises that the reps made, nor a specific action plan.
So the funny part was that I can’t speak to anyone I did prior because they have so many call centers…How should they fix that? The notes on my account lack detail and specifics of the discussion, how can they fix that? And I have spent 6 hours on the phone with them, Should I Send Them a Bill?
If my company Bills hourly between $150-$225 per hour, should I send them a bill for $900+??? What do you think?
Watch Out for the Bear Trap!!!
August 27th, 2010
Have you ever been in your office when your boss storms in to talk about something super exciting? “Hey, I just locked us in to do this massive event in the city and over 10,000 people are going to be there it is going to be awesome for our company!!!” His enthusiasm is addictive and you start to get really excited that your boss came to you to share the good news. As your boss talks through all the great things that need to be done to make this a reality you suddenly find yourself agreeing to handle tasks relating to the events.
You got so star struck by your boss and enthused about his success that you started agreeing to all his seemingly small requests! The next thing you know is that you are Running the Event and your boss has dished 100% of it off on you! You got caught in the Bear Trap.
Executives and “bosses” are really good at throwing around the Bear Trap and you need to always be on the look out for it. Many times tasks are accepted that have nothing to do with our roles and responsibilities and may deter us away from achieving our own goals. The next time your boss comes in to speak with you…Beware of the Bear Trap!
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
August 26th, 2010
There is a great book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team that can help take your team to the next level. Patrick Lencioni identifies the five dysfunctions:
1. Absence of Trust
2. Fear of Conflict
3. Lack of Commitment
4. Avoidance of Accountability
5. Inattention to Results
If you were to evaluate your team, do any of the five above grab your attention? Here are some signs to watch for:
- Hesitate to ask for help or provide constructive feedback- Absence of Trust
- Dread meetings and find reasons to avoid spending time together- Absence of Trust
- Have boring meetings- Fear of Conflict
- Fail to tap into all the opinions and perspectives of team members- Fear of Conflict
- Revisits discussions and decisions again and again-Lack of Commitment
- Misses deadlines and key deliverables-Avoidance of Accountability
- Place an undue burden on the team leader as the sole source of discipline- Avoidance of Accountability
- Stagnates//fails to grow-Inattention to Results
- Is easily distracted- Inattention to Results
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.
The Octopus Can Read – Book Review
August 23rd, 2010
We just got done reading the book The Power of Focus by Canfield, Hansen & Hewitt. It was an eye opening book that sequenced a series of tasks that guided us to achieve business and personal goals.
This is the first book we have commented about in our Blog and thought it worthy enough to mention to our readers. If you are looking to make steps to achieve a higher level of success, understand yourself better and actually execute, then this book is for you.
We followed all the steps in the book and it opened new doors and relationships for us in ways that we thought were not possible. This book led to us forming a board of advisors with specific people to help guide our decisions and business. The book also had us truly understand what goals had priorities over others and how to narrow down. We have seen improvement in our performance and employee morale.
We would highly recommend this easy read, but challenging to do, to anyone interested in doing work to achieve a higher level of success and enjoyment.
Mission Possible Today…Click to Launch
August 23rd, 2010
Today at Octopus HQ we are planning to help several dozen Chiropractors…The only challenge is that they, “the Chiro’s”, do not know it yet! We have worked with 4 small to large size healthcare offices in the past several months and have achieved significant ROI for our clients. The Chiropractic profession is a large industry with a ton of potential, but many chiropractors do not have much business training.
Because Chiropractors, Medical Doctors, Lawyers, Accountants, Dentists and other professional services providers do not have business training, many of them rely on consultants or the school of hard knocks to help them. We help these types of businesses. Many of our current professional services clients want to grow their practices and have come as far as they can on their own and now need some assistance. We work with many of these companies to push them past the glass ceiling and increase the level of production and design a management systems for them to grow.
If you are a professional service provider and would like to speak to us about our services or how we can help get you to the next level of growth, please Click Here.
Cocktails & Business…WOW!!!
August 20th, 2010
Last night we met with a client that has designed and created her own type of alcoholic beverage. It is an amazingly smooth drink that makes you want to throw a party! We are helping her grow and market the business. We have partnered with an attorney to create the business entity, obtain the proper licensing and ensure we are following the many laws of the adult beverage industry.
We are really pleased to be working with this client because the project is very different from what we usually do. It offers the chance to help an impressive women launch a new company and product from the ground up…something we have a significant amount of experience in doing. We can not disclose much at this point, but we want to keep all of our readers up to date on this, so that when the product goes to market or is available for sample you get the inside scoop!
In a few weeks we will be updating you on this project given day one is today! Stay Tuned….