Is your Business Fat, Skinny or Just Right????
July 8th, 2010
As Performance Management consultants we deal with many companies that have organization structure that is out of control.
How many people report to your CEO 1, 5, 10+? Does your organization structure change every time a new person is hired? How much has your business grown and how much has it become out of control?
These are many of the issues our clients face. Many do not understand the importance of how a company could be and is structured, nor the importance. It could be too fat having 8, 10 or more people reporting to the CEO or it may be too skinny only having 1 or 2. There is a balance to designing the organization structure that is right for you and your business.
Talking about organization structure is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but it is more important than most people think. Of the top 5 issues we see across all clients, poor communications is the most consistent problem. Most of these companies have issues in their organizational structure and business flow, which leads to the poor communications. It is not that employees don’t want to talk; it is just flaws in the design and systems.
So if the foundation of a building is not built correctly then it will eventually will fail. The reason teamwork and communication are the two biggest causes for business to fail may have a great deal to do with how your business is set up on its foundation.
Fat businesses move really slow and overwhelm leadership and management by having too many direct reports. Skinny businesses tend to keep people towards the bottom and limit growth. Don’t be fat and don’t be a skinny business. Find out the sweet spot for strengthening your foundation and building a fluid organization.
How to Quickly increase Your YMCA Member Sales
June 8th, 2010
This week is YMCA week. We spend a great deal of time with YMCA’s and yesterday we spoke about member retention and today we are going to speak to the importance of Recovery. Member Recovery is the about having processes in place to, reach back out to past members and get them to re-join.
The great part about Member Recovery is that this target market has already been a member. There are strategies we implement to drive them back. If your YMCA has 9,000 Members and your retention rate is 50% then you lose 4,500 members per yer. First that is way too low and you should also be working on retention strategies, but recovery plans are equally important.
With Member Recovery, you have customer information like: Name, Address, Phone, Email, Type of Membership in the Past, etc. All your efforts to Recovering members will be a 2 part strategy: Direct Marketing and Direct Sales.
Direct Marketing: Stay in communication via email and mailer. Send you past members a survey and find out why they left. You may be doing things wrong and not know it and that is why members are leaving. Never assume you know. Keep you past members updated with what is happening at the YMCA. Find out the type of membership they had in the past and send them a mailer with a discounted offer with call to action to help increase your probability of hitting their “sweet spots”. Email us for more strategies: info@theoctopussolution.com
Direct Sales: You can not image how dirty of a word sales is at YMCA’s. It is Dirty. But Direct Sales is more effective than Direct Mail, so why are you not doing it? Assign your most likely sales person to make phone calls one day out of the week. Print your past member database and let one of your staff hit the phones. Go over a script, talking points and action items. The start of the script should be to determine again, why they left your YMCA. Ask them what is needed to get them back as a valued member. Take action with trying to close them on another membership over the phone or schedule a meeting at the Y to discuss coming back. It is best to try to close the membership over the phone.
Member Recovery is a very important step in your strategy and should not be underestimated. Member Acquisition, Retention and Recovery Strategies are all vital to having maximum impact on member growth. Email us to discuss more YMCA strategies: info@theoctopussolution.com
What is your Brand saying?
April 8th, 2010
So many people talk about branding, but what is it and who are you?
Branding – definition by the American Marketing Association: A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.
Image– definition by the American Marketing Association: The consumer perception of a product, institution, brand, business, or person that may or may not corre-spond with “reality” or “actuality.” For marketing purposes the “image of what is” may be more important than “what actually is.”
With complete clarity, does your brand & image line up with your communications, customer perception and values? Well let’s take the discussion back to how you form a relationship with someone. We meet many people throughout our lives and starting a relationship (dating, friend, etc) is just about taking the initial steps to get to know someone to discover if you relate to them and wish to continue the relationship. You may spend 6 months with a colleague at the office and at one point you have “really” got to know that person and you conclude that they are not who you thought they were when you first met. Happens all the time. The point is that when you start marketing you must communicate consistently. So your image today can’t be drastically different then your image tomorrow. In friendship we call that having “multiple personality disorder”.
So what if a business is having difficulty with who they are? Maybe they have new management, recently acquired other companies, or what ever the case may be, it is critical to any marketing success that a business know who they are and what they deliver and to whom. Without knowing who you are and what you want to be, there will be major disconnect with your brand and image in the eyes of the customer. So back up and get the high level strategy worked out first before sporadically marketing an inconsistent business. If you have confusion, your customers most likely do too. Consistency in your communication builds the foundation of trust and security with customers.
If you are having trouble determining who you are, the people that can help you are your customers. Survey them and get the real answers!
Disconnected with the audience and reality…poor Oscar image
March 8th, 2010
The Oscars are moving closer and closer to their death. Was it me or was there zero energy in that room and very poor jokes and interaction. We saw commercials this year months in advance to get the momentum generated for the Oscars, but what happened…all marketing talk and no event action delivery.
Is Hollywood so elite and stuck in their paradigm that they are unwilling to do things differently? They even resorted to tasteless stand up comedy routines of picking on people in the crowd. Wrong venue for a roast! They also wanted 2 crusty men standing up trying to deliver the awards show, which did not go well.
There was no energy because the creative minds of Hollywood were not thinking creatively to deliver a different and better show. Here is the deal: Oscar, you need to do something different. Yes the event is formal, but it does not have to mean the audience is dead. There needs to be methods put in place to generate energy prior to the event, just before the event, during the event and after. This was not done well. Even the backdrops were terrible.
Hey Hollywood, call someone to help fix those marketing and event shenanigans!
Company Communication Break Downs
January 8th, 2010
As a business grows beyond one single employee to 10, 100, 1000+, communication becomes more and more of a challenge. We have found that companies can have multiple layers and platforms for communication between employees. The two main reasons small businesses fail are teamwork and organization. The common thread with both of those is effective communication.
For example: If the CEO and Finance department are using outlook to communicate with staff and running all meetings, calendars and communication from that and the sales team does not know how to use the calendar or is running on Gmail then there is real problems. Don’t laugh at something so simple, it happens often.
Communications management is also important by all managers in the company. Management may be something as simple as: If the excepted rule of communications in a company is email with a “read receipt” response and a few employees start communicating bits and pieces of information via Memo or verbal communication, then there is a breakdown in the system which will lead to exceptions becoming rules.
It is critical to maintain a consistent communication system for several reasons: 1. It is easier to train employees on one system than two, 2. The system can be monitored and improved more easy, 3. If the employees of a company can communicate more effectively it will lead to a stronger team with better performance and less time spent dealing with problems. 4. If the communications internally with your employees is a mess think about how that transpires to the customers and what level of confusion they must feel?
Pay attention to the communication system you have, it will affect all areas of your business and customer perception of you!