Sunday, November 28, 2010

Leadership Matters

This is the third blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth and is a topic many of us as small business owners take for granted. After 25 years in this business, it has become more apparent than ever that leadership is a key to success. As I work with small businesses both inside the IT channel and in the marketplace at large, leadership seems to be a missing link for many organizations today. There seems to be a tendency to believe that investments in tools and processes will make businesses successful. My experience says that just ain’t so.

Leadership is required to have ongoing success. People don’t “just get it” by some sort of osmosis. They need, and quite frankly, want to be led. The problem with leadership is not so much the followers as it is those who are supposed to be the leaders. Owning a business is more than just filing the needed paperwork. It doesn’t make you a leader any more than just giving birth makes a woman a good mother. Leadership requires focus and hard work. It means we have to invest in ourselves – now that is a new concept for many – because we have to be able to grow if we want to lead our company.

The Law of the Lid
John Maxwell talks about the “Law of the Lid” which unfortunately describes the place many small businesses are today. This law says that you can’t lead your company beyond your personal leadership level. The company can’t pass you up. You are the lid – and if you are not continually investing in yourself and growing in your leadership and management skills – your company will get stuck and not be able to continue moving forward. Often owners want to blame their staff for these periods of stagnation when they need to look in the mirror and realize the problem starts with themselves.

Level 5 Leadership
One of the best descriptions of the way leadership growth occurs comes from the 5 levels of leadership. Most of us in IT began our companies as highly competent contributors – we were very good at what we did and decided to start a company. Problem is – that is level one leadership – and it doesn’t take a company very far. If we don’t invest in learning and growing our leadership skills we will remain leading company of ourselves and maybe one or two others. We can’t grow beyond that as we are the limiting factor. We must move up the leadership ladder and work toward becoming a level five leader. At that point we will have opened the doors to leading our company as far as we wish – leadership won’t be the issue – and we can grow and take our team toward that strategy and planning we have put in place.



Discipline
Another aspect of leadership is that it always is focused on people. But beyond people, good-to-great organizations have three forms of discipline:
• Disciplined people – you don’t need hierarchy,
• Disciplined thought – you don’t need bureaucracy
• Disciplined action – you don’t need excessive controls
When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, it results in great performance. But this culture has to be caught, not just taught, and it requires leadership from the top. The culture of discipline will happen as your team observes what and how you live. As the owner, you set the tone and the culture. It is up to you to create the discipline your company needs to succeed. It comes through leadership.

A hard question
Verne Harnish wrote that A-Player execs read 24 books per year. How do you measure up with those facts which were gathered by Brad Smart, father of the Topgrading concept, who researched 6500 top executives? So what is the difference between the A-players and the C-players? The A-players were continuous learners, reading on average 24 books per year (12 fiction and 12 non-fiction). That is how we become better leaders. We have to be learners. It must be continual, focused and intentional as we build our leadership toolbox and skills. If we don’t, we really have to ask ourselves whether we belong on our own bus or not. As the research showed - those who don't read barely have an advantage over those who can't!! That is a sobering reality. We must dig in and learn.

My story
I led for many years believing I had all the skill I needed to take us forward. I even bragged that I hadn’t read a book since high school – I managed to graduate college without reading any books at all – just love those Cliff notes and study aids. But we stalled and I was frustrated and then one day I looked in the mirror and realized that the problem was me. I had gone about as far as I could take us and realized it was time to wake up and become a leader. So I began reading and getting involved with peers and attending seminars and just learning all I could. I was the cap. Too often that is how small business goes. The owner just doesn’t make the needed investment in self and team to keep growing the business. Don’t make that mistake. You truly can’t lead your company past your own ability. Leadership matters – become a continual learner and take your company to new heights.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Faith in the Workplace - A Guest Post

At Networking Results, faith is as integral a part of the company as IT itself.

By Steve Moreau

If your faith is genuine, and it helps guide your professional and personal decisions, how could you not introduce faith into this thing that consumes so much of our lives? Our entire management team is Christian and we make no apology for it. We believe that we have been entrusted with a company that provides the support for many employee families, customers, partners, and vendors, so it should be run in a way that will maximize success.

Success is more than the bottom line, although that’s how we measure our success. But we also measure success based on the lives of our employees—both personal and professional. On the professional side, we want to provide opportunities for training and the ability to be in a position where they can shine, which manifests itself in job satisfaction. This is how we live out our faith in what we do.

But we realize that there is more to a person than just his or her professional self, and from my experience, most everyone has some sort of spiritual belief, and we are not ashamed to have created an atmosphere in which it is safe to talk about it. When we bring in food, we take time and say a prayer before we eat, for example, and employees feel comfortable asking if we would remember them or someone they know in our prayers. In those instances we don’t then gather everyone and say a prayer, although there have been a few times in management meetings when we get word that someone has been in an accident, and we will immediately take some time and pray for a safe recovery.

To us that’s extending our human compassion. We are working with individuals and in relationships, and in the end, even though we are a technology company, we’re more of a relationship company.

We have no formal process, and we are not in people’s faces about spirituality. Our actions and the way we live our lives scream a whole lot louder than anything we could say. For us, faithfulness comes from living out what we believe and allowing other people to exercise their faith as well, without any pressure to do anything they are not comfortable with.

There has not been a case when we have felt a need to restrain anyone in the company from talking about faith. What I do try to encourage, as I mentioned, is rather than just talking about it, let’s live it. Our actions will show what we believe. But if you are living it, you might as well have the option of talking about it as well, so we certainly don’t want to discourage that.

Still, we are a regular bunch of people who have lots of good times together. But there are guiding principles we follow, and those tend to align with traditional Judeo-Christian precepts of integrity, justice, fairness, and stewardship, by which we mean looking out for what has been entrusted to us.

Even from the owner’s standpoint, is this his business? Well, it is as far as ownership is concerned, but it has also been entrusted to him. There is a purpose in everything, and at this point in time, God has entrusted us with the employees in the company and our customers and partners, and we have to make sure we’re doing the right thing by all of them. We have to be accountable and compassionate. These are all straight out of the Bible.

There is such a big concern with trying to be politically correct in this world that we lose some of the compassion of trying to be a good person. If I really believed what was in the Bible and yet was not able to offer compassion to others, then I would be pretty shallow. This has been a tough economy, with lots of people out of work, and our faith helps us deal with it. Our belief is that God knows much better than any of us and he’s going to see us through it.

People find themselves in some difficult circumstances, with some very difficult challenges. Life is messy, but there is hope out there; there is hope that this isn’t all there is.



Thanks to Steve Moreau for sharing this post. It really defines NetRes and many other companies in the small business field. Problem is, too many don't have the backbone to let their faith show. We hide things and want to "fit in" rather than be the light we are called to be. Kudo's to Jeff, Steve and their team in Texas for all they are doing to be salt and light!

Friday, November 19, 2010

Planning Matters

This is the second blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth and is a topic many of us as small business owners take for granted. After 25 years in this business, it has become more apparent than ever that planning is a key to success. Zig Ziglar says it this way: “Unless you have definite, precise, clearly set goals, you are not going to realize the maximum potential that lies within you”.


No Plan
I didn’t have a plan for many years. So my examples are more what not to do than what to do. I formed SCCI (now HTS) as a hobby back in 1985. It was just going to be a small sideline business to allow me to help a few folks with their computers.

  • Today it is 7 locations across 5 states with 80+ employees that will do over 16M in revenue. It is a hobby that is way out of control.

  • Our headquarters office in Harlan has had 5 additions since we began in 1985. So today we have 12,000 square feet attached to the side of our home on the farm in rural Iowa. Not exactly the best plan knowing what I know today.

  • HTG was started back in 2000 as a small peer group for four Iowa companies. Today it has become an international group with 240 plus member companies from four countries around the world. Certainly was not what my original expectations were.

Do as I say, not as I did
I could list a few dozen or hundred more examples of how things have happened that were not planned. The ones above are all positive results - maybe not everything they could have been – but not a list of all of my failed planning which doesn't always turn out that way. A failure to plan has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and caused a lot of pain and chaos. I admit it and can show you the battle scars from eBay sales of obsolete inventory because of no plan in how to control ordering, to business units that were totally unprofitable because they never had a business plan at all, to wasting hours and days of my life because it just happened to me without me taking control of my time with a plan. If you don’t plan, you will struggle to have success. It was back in the late 90’s when things began to unravel for us that I finally figured this out. During the last 10 years or more that planning has been part of our process, our growth and success has been completely different and positive. Planning does matter and it will for you too.

Four Plans
I think there are at least 4 areas you need to plan at a minimum:

  • Company business plan – tells you where your company is going

  • Leadership plan – tells you how you will lead your company to achieve their plan

  • Life plan – tells you how you will balance life and work and achieve the things you say are most important to you

  • Legacy plan – tells others what to do in the event your company or you are not able to continue status quo

I have written previously about each of these and you can follow the links to get more details.

Here is the way we see it in HTG - four plans - one we focus on each quarter - which provides a solid way to make sure we are getting things done.



Why don't we do it?

So why is it that most small businesses don’t plan? Here is a list of some of the common excuses I hear from folks. There really are no good reasons, but we convince ourselves these things:

  • Planning is hard work and takes time

  • Planning never ends

  • Planning requires communication

  • Planning requires introspection

  • Planning requires follow-up and measurement

  • Planning requires us to be honest with ourselves

  • Planning is bigger than me, myself and I


Hand in hand

Planning goes hand in hand with strategy. You need strategy to give you the “why” to what you are going to work on. But planning takes strategy and tells us the “how, when, what, where, and who” to achieve that strategy. It is important that we take time to plan. It is critical for us to truly grow our company and move toward success. Time to stop making excuses and step up to lead. That means you take time to involve your team, stakeholders and anyone else that should be included – and you just get it done. If you don’t have a plan, you are planning to fail. Don’t let that happen. Get down to business, take the time, invest the energy, and put plans down on paper. It will make a huge difference in your outcome!

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Strategy Matters

This is the first blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth and is a topic many of us as small business owners take for granted. After 25 years in this business, it has become more apparent than ever that strategy truly does matter. It isn't how things typically start. Certainly not in my case.

Many of us began our businesses because we were good at what we did and decided we could make a business from it. We are typically good technically or as sales people and begin to hire a person or two to help us serve more folks. In my case, I started the technology business as a hobby because I really enjoyed computers. 1985 was the start and there was not grand plan, no long range strategy, just myself and my bride (who wasn't all that sure of the idea) that started to sell and service Apply computers.

It was just me for the first five years and then I hired my first employee - which changes everything. No longer can I just do whatever whenever and be able to expect others to read my mind. That is how I tended to run things for quite some time. But osmosis doesn't really work, and people can't read my mind, so it was time to begin making some changes.

Over the years I have had to change how I lead. And one of the major adjustments has been to define and let people know about strategy. That requires thinking about things far beyond the normal day to day tactical operations which is where most small business owners are most comfortable. After all, we can fix most anything and sell what we need to without a strategy can't we? That is true for a while, but soon you hit a ceiling and one major reason is that others are not sure what the plan is or how to really help the company grow.

We have to identify that "house on the hill" or "BHAG" as it is oftened called if we want others on our team to be able to help join us in taking the company there. They can't just figure it out as we often think they should. It needs to be defined and written and shared. It must be measured and updated and adjusted. It is hard work but vital to keep the company growing.

What it really means is that we must begin to think like a CEO. There are bad connotations to that role today, but it isn't the role that is an issue, but the people who fill that seat. For many small businesses - no one is sitting in that chair and no strategy happens. CEO thinking is strategic. It is forward looking and future facing. It is very different from how most of us are wired today. But it is critical. Here is a table showing some of the areas I believe we need to consider and the differences in the role of CEO think vs President or GM think.



We don't default to thinking like a CEO as the entrepreneur that founded the company. That is somewhat foreign territory for us. But if we want to take our company to the next level, we have to learn to think differently. We must begin to think strategically. That transformation does not happen overnight. It takes time and effort and a desire to learn. But it can happen, and when it does, your company will be poised to go to the next level.

Many of us lie about whether we truly have a business when the reality is we really just have a job. The way to transistion from a job that makes us......
  • wear too many hats
  • work too many hours
  • handle too many things
  • makes us a slave
.......is to change how we think and run our company. That is why strategy matters. It is the only way we can break out of our cycle of being controlled by the business and change it to what a business must be - one that serves the owner.

CEO thinking is not easy - but it is essential. HTG is committed to helping our members get there. We hold our CEO Forum twice a year to help focus owners on transitioning from the day to day to strategy. That is the leap we must make.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

10 Things I Accidentally Learned

This past week I was in Orlando and shared at the IT Nation event hosted by ConnectWise. The topic was “10 Things I Accidentally Learned Along the Path to Growth”. Since I am one of the older folks in the industry, experience is on my side, and there have been some fairly painful learning experiences over the past 25 years. Ten of them stood out as significant – so that is what I shared. I will be writing in much more detail about these on this blog over the next few weeks – but here is the list and highlights for now:

1. Strategy Matters – we have to understand the "why" so we can set our sights on where we are going and know the outcome we pursue.
2. Planning is Key – we need to plan in at least 4 key areas – business, leadership, life and legacy – and the more we plan the luckier we get!
3. Leadership is Required – we have to grow as leaders both in our company and for our clients. We can’t lead people where we have never been.
4. Cash is King – our ability to grow and continue to lead in this industry can happen only when we have managed our cash well.
5. Growth is Hard Work – many think growth just happens. It doesn't. It takes a lot of continual effort and always is harder, slower and longer than expected.
6. Sell is Not a Four Letter Word – Ok - actually it is, but for many years I missed the boat on this one. Nothing happens until someone sells something. We have to become a strong sales organization.
7. Vendors Are Not The Enemy – we must learn to leverage their resources to help drive our business.
8. Success Without Balance is Empty – if we lose track of what matters and do not balance work and life – the results really don’t matter. We must manage our time and focus.
9. Keep Your Eye on the Customer – our marching orders come directly from them, not the latest fad or trend, and we must listen closely and respond quickly.
10. It is All About Relationships – we are in the people business actually helping folks with adapting to change. Boil it all down to this – we are in the change management business.

So that is my list – I probably forgot a few important thoughts along the way. The response has been overwhelming from those who heard it. As I sat down to create this presentation, it occurred to me that there are no items on the list that deal with technology itself. In the last 25 years some rather major changes have occurred. There was no Internet when we started. Cell phones were 20 pounds and not reliable. A portable computer was a luggable that weighed 40 pounds and was the size of your entire desk. IP telephony hadn’t even been thought of. Very little of the technology that we deal with today was even a glimmer in someone’s eye back in 1985. But the reality is that technology without a person using it has little value. It is about people and how they apply what we sell. We are in the people business – we must never forget that – and technology is just a tool we have to serve them. Our success will be measured by how well we keep our eye on that ball. Let’s make sure people are in the center of everything we do!