Life Matters

This is the eighth blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth. Without a doubt this is the most important of the ten items - that success without balance in your life is empty. Some of the most successful people alive are also the most unhappy. The reality is that success does not equal happiness. Success does not equal fulfillment. Success by itself, and certainly alone, means nothing. So before you go chasing success - having the biggest company or the most profitable EBITDA or the most customers or employees - know why you are doing it and how you will make it meaningful so it brings happiness along with it. Otherwise you are wasting your time, and ultimately your life, pursuing a dream to nowhere!

The Problem
The world is full of the results of folks who fail to keep balance in their lives. Here is a short list of things I see every day:

• Marriages crumble
• Families are destroyed
• Friendships become distant
• Businesses crash and burn
• People self destruct

As small business owners we seem to think that working hard will cover a multitude of sins. It doesn't - it might take care of the bills and put some money into the retirement account - but money never buys happiness. It will not ever make up for the lost hours with your spouse, kids, family or friends. Money can't buy the important things in life - it bandaids the real problem most of us have - how we use and prioritize our time. Working hard is not the answer. Being intentional and disciplined is.

Hard Reality
Here are the cold hard facts. Every human being on this planet gets 168 hours every week. No more, no less. The biggest responsibility we have is how we will use those precious hours to make the most significant impact. There are some jobs that only you can do. No one can really replace you as spouse and father. Oh we certainly try to do that a lot - but divorce is messy and painful and not a solution to failure to put people first. The facts are that you are not indispensible at work. There are plenty of people capable of filling the roles at the office. Maybe not exactly the way you would do it. But those tasks will get done. But no one can truly fill your role as husband/wife or dad/mom. We try to offload it - but it doesn't work. Figure out the things that only you can do - and do them first.

Why we work all the time
I know what drives most of you to work too many hours. You get validated more easily there than at home. Let's be honest - it is pretty easy to be validated by people who don't really know you. You can become the hero pretty quickly at work. There are a lot less messy things to deal with - and you normally have help to deal with a lot of areas at work that fall only on your shoulders at home. It is tough to sometimes recieve validation from our spouse and kids. We can get into a negative cycle and just want to run to work to avoid feeling incompetent. But we have to understand the dynamics of home life. Living with people 24/7/365 is a whole lot different than the 8-10 hours or so we are together at work. We don't do holidays with our co-workers. We don't go on vacations together. It isn't a fair comparison so we just need to realize that it often "feels better" at work than home. BUT that is no excuse to spend every waking hour there or run back to the office if things at home get a bit tough. Nothing is more important than taking care of business at home first. That is where our first use of the 168 hours we are blessed with each week need to be spent.

Balance is a hard thing
Balance is a challenging target to aim for. There are so many things pulling us in so many ways that it is difficult to achieve. But I know no one in their retirement or on their death bed who ever said they wished they had worked more hours. I have heard many people say they wish they had spent more time with those they loved. We only get to use our precious 168 hours once - we can't bank them - we get no do-overs - we have to do it right the first time. It is critical we truly spend time planning how we do that.

Do it well
It is important to know what success really is so we don't get to the end of our career and decide we totally missed it. Have you defined success? Do you know what it means to truly achieve? Life matters far more that success by itself. If we blend success with a solid plan for what matters in life - which always involves people - we can have the best of both worlds. If we don't - we will miss one or the other and end up frustrated and unfulfilled. Don't miss the mark. Get some balance and a plan for what it means to truly be successful in your life. It is much more than work. A life plan is a critical part of that process. Don't wait another year - get started now!

Sales Matter

This is the sixth blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth. There is little question that many small business owners really dislike the whole sales process or anything that is related to it - particularly in the IT industry. But sales is not a four letter word - well it is - but it isn't a bad one. And there is little question that sales really do matter. That could be the understatement of the century actually.

Why is there such an aversion to sales by so many IT firms? Well for many of us, we came up to leading our company via the technical side of the business. We were engineers that were good at what we did and then decided to hire a few more like us and form a company. That works for a while but soon we hit the wall because we don't sell - we can fix anything under the sun - but we don't sell. I use don't rather than can't here intentionally. Anyone can sell - maybe not equally well - but it isn't that IT owners can't sell - it is because they almost despise the idea and certainly the notion of what being a salesperson is all about. Time to get over it!

Nothing happens until something gets sold. Let me say it again - nothing happens until something gets sold. OK - I have admitted it in public. We need to sell if we want to have a business. And sales is not a matter of luck. It happens when we build a sales process and system that makes sales happen regularly. We have to make the investment to put the right system and tools in place to make it happen. It can't be a hope and a prayer. That is not a sales strategy. Sales happen when we build the right foundation, hire the right people and execute the plan consistently. It really is not magic - it just takes consistent hard work doing the right things every day.

Most sales people fail because of a lack of support and management. It is common in the IT small business space to have a revolving door of sales people. We hire a person, let them flounder around on their own for 3-4 months and then fire them because they haven't sold much or anything at all. We blame them. Here is a newsflash - they likely are NOT the problem. You are. We set most new sales hires up for failure. We don't give them the right tools. We don't have a system in place. We don't manage or support them. We wish them well and sit back waiting to count the money. It just doesn't work like that. Owner attitude and support will make or break the sales engine in any company. Take a good look in the mirror and you will likely find the problem with your sales people.

When we do find that super human who is able to defy the odds of our lack of support and systems and actually sell something - it only lasts for a while. That is because without marketing support - every sales person will eventually run out of opportunities and people they know to sell to. It is our job to create leads for our sales people to follow up on. That is called marketing. It is hard work. It costs lots of money. It is somewhat luck - often more magic than science from my experience. But without marketing support - without aircover and other supporting tools to help drive leads and open doors - even a veteran sales person with many years of success will stub their toe. It is necessary to spend money on marketing to have consistent sales performance.

The pendulum is rapidly swinging toward sales. I see some major changes that are already in motion and will change the landscape as we know it for IT for many years to come. The cloud will force us to become sales organizations. You can resist, hide you head in the sand, and wake up one day wondering what has happened to your customer base. Or you can accept the fact that change is coming and make some changes. Some of these changes have been in motion for a while. Others are more a result of the current market and the move toward the cloud. But no matter the reason - they are coming. Here are some observations:

•From technical to sales focus
•From answering the phone to creating demand
•From selling products to selling solutions
•From T&E to flat rate services
•From on premise to the cloud

No longer will the company with the most technical genius necessarily win. I predict that those with most mature sales approach will actually come out on top. This new reality is that the IT business is moving toward a transactional relationship and those who can sell will win in that landscape. The reality is that companies must become sales organizations. We have to deal with these realities:

•Sales people are not the enemy
•It requires new thinking and management
•It requires new compensation models

Along with that we must become marketing organizations:

•Referrals are great but go only so far
•Most companies have just continued to sell new solutions to their current base
•We must become lead generators for the sales team
• Lead generation is not the vendors responsibility

Here is the reality as I see it. If you don’t embrace sales, growth will be stagnant and you will be frustrated. That is - if you survive. There will be plenty of companies that fail completely because they refuse to adopt the notion of becoming sales organizations. You don't have to like it - but it does work better if you do. You do have to do it and the time to begin is immediately. You can't afford to wait on this one. Begin now to learn to sell. Put the right systems in place. Hire someone and invest in them. Manage them closely and carefully. And begin to see the results - the sooner you begin - the sooner you will reap some of the goodness that comes with selling something. Remember - nothing happens until you sell something. Get after that today!

Growth is Hard Work

This is the fifth blog post regarding the 10 Things I Accidentally Learned on the Path to Growth. There is little question that many small business owners really don’t understand just how difficult the growth process really is. The common misconception is that if you show up every day and work hard – it just happens. That has not been my experience. There are many steps along the path to growing a business, and it must be done intentionally and executed continually to keep moving forward.

It all starts with you. You started your business because you wanted to be your own boss. You wanted to call the shots. There is a likelihood that you worked for someone else and decided you could do it better. But when you make the decision to grow – it can’t be about you anymore. Growth means you have to involve others – inside and outside your company. And that is the first step. You have to hire someone.

I remember those days well. It was a scary proposition. All of a sudden I was responsible for payroll which meant we had to be generating revenue. I sort of convinced myself it was ok to work some of the time and not pay myself – after all it was my company. But when you bring on that first employee they typically don’t quite see it that way. They come to work with the expectation they will get a paycheck and they should. So we have to know how we will generate enough revenue and keep them busy so we can pay them.

This is usually when the first lesson of growth occurs. It isn’t a straight line up. We have steps – take a few forward and then one backward. It looks something like this for many:

Seldom do companies grow with the green line – just up and to the right continually with no hiccups. Nor do companies maintain their situation like the red line – stagnant without change. I am a believer that if you are not growing – you are shrinking because I seldom if ever see a company just stay the same. But growth is a series of ups and downs and that is normal. It isn’t a mistake – and there isn’t anything wrong with you when it happens – it is the reality of how growth occurs.

There are a half dozen key stages I see in the growth cycle. The following chart shows some of them and areas where they may show up in your growth pattern.

You won’t necessarily experience all of these in the same order or at the same level as the chart describes, but as you grow your IT firm you are likely to experience all of them along the way.

That takes us to the second step – which is the need to become a sales organization. To be totally honest – this is the one where many companies get hung up. It may happen with 2-3 employees or you may make it to 7-8, but at some point sales will be your blocker to growth. Why? Nothing happens until someone sells something. I will go into much more detail on sales in a future blog post. It is essential, so embrace it and accept the fact it has to happen if you want to grow.

This is the first of what I consider to be the five key areas to growth:
1. Become a sales organization
2. Learn how to market
3. Put in place and execute process
4. Develop leadership
5. Understand the power of strategic relationships

My experience is that if you understand and work through these key blockers – you will grow and grow significantly. But each one can plateau you for years or for life. You can’t skip any step – the order may change – but all are essential to continually growing your company.

Realize that your business should serve you – not the other way around. If the business controls your life – you have a job. You probably left a job to start your business so don’t just trade one for the other. Dreams should be coming true. You should have more freedom – not less. It has to function without your presence – if you are required to make it work – you have a job with a different title on it. It should be predictable in meeting your goals and needs. It should not require you – or the 4 P’s from you:
· Your presence
· Your personality
· Your problem solving
· Your persperation

As you build your sales organization you begin to feel like you are losing control. Not everything goes through you anymore. You have to trust others. It is a huge step. But if everything flows through you – then you are the bottleneck to growth and not only will you restrict that – you restrict profit potential as well. You cannot be the center of your company forever. The only way you escape the problem is to keep growing and putting others in places you once were responsible. That is called delegation – not something many entrepreneurs are comfortable with – because no one does it quite like we do. But we have to get over that and let others do the work.

So you have began to build a sales team and hired a sales person or two. They are selling and then hit the wall. They run out of people they know and places to call on. That is when marketing has to kick in. Marketing is key to keeping a sales team productive. They don’t manufacture sales – they close leads and turn them into sales. Many small business owners make the mistake of thinking that just hiring a sales person fixes all the sales issues. In fact it just creates more needs. They have to be closely managed and there has to be a consistent lead generation system to keep them productive. They can’t just make this stuff up. It has to be fed to them so they can do what they do – go build relationships and close deals. That is what we hire them to do so now we have to equip them with the tools they need for success.

Next comes the need for some sanity in the midst of chaos. Many companies go for years without any process, procedures or policies in place. And then as they have some success and grow – things quickly get out of control because you can’t scale without processes. So in the teens for number of employees you have to get things written down and folks trained to follow them. It is hard work. We never have time for it. And changing behavior to follow is a difficult task because we are upsetting their world. Why do we need this all of a sudden? It is far easier to do this step early with few employees than wait for the chaos to require it. But most of us don’t make the time until it is mission critical. And that is driven as we grow to a certain point. Take it from me – it is far easier to write a process for two than for twelve. Do it early – do it well – and set the example to follow them.

After some more growth and success we begin to run into a leadership void. We typically expect our people to learn by osmosis and just being around us. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way from my experience. So we have to make investments and train folks on leadership. That is essential as we will need to grow practices around key technologies, vertical markets or opportunities. Many companies don’t have nearly the leadership they need to continue growing. It is a sad reality. It happens because we have been too cheap to invest and too busy to notice than no one else is really stepping up to lead. This costs money and takes time – intentional and significant time – which far too many small business owners never take. We seldom invest in our own skill building let alone that of others. But if we want to keep growing we have to build leadership and a team that can help make that happen.

At some point along the curve we grow past our ability to drive continued growth on our own. That is when the value of strategic relationships kicks in gear. I find it happens somewhere past 50 employees and it becomes essential to learn to leverage the investment other partners in the ecosystem are making. We need to use their marketing, lead generations, services and tools to help to continue drive the business. But it is all about building and maintaining strong relationships. It won’t happen accidentally and I find this one area to be a key blocker for many companies that are trying to grow. More on this topic in a future blog post as well.

Growth has many steps. They don’t all move upward and to the right. It is hard work and requires determination, dedication and a very big desire. But you can grow if you truly want to and commit to it. We have experienced it even on the farm in Iowa where our business is operated. It isn’t magic – it is hard work and execution day after day to work toward a strategic objective. Plan for growth and then execute to achieve it. Realize it means change often along the way. But you can achieve it if you want to!

Cash Matters

This is the fourth 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 don’t deal with well at all. After 25 years in this business, it has become more apparent than ever that access to cash is a key to success. I hear and see so many small businesses strapped by a lack of cash resources. They may even be doing well from a sales perspective, but because of poor cash management they have totally limited their options and ultimately stymied their ability to grow. Cash is king and we must never forget that reality.

A strong balance sheet goes a long way during tough times
One of the common mistakes I see owners make is to rob their companies of all the cash they accumulate as profits during the year. That assumes that they are generating a profit, but for any company to survive that has to be one of the outcomes of doing business. But removing all the cash leaves the company vulnerable in the event of tough economic conditions, or even a temporary downturn. That is particularly true if you don’t have a bank credit line in place. There are varying opinions on how much equity to leave in a business – but my advice is to be conservative and leave as much in as you possibly can. Now if you have to take all you earn just to survive each year – you really don’t have a business – just a job that is meeting your basic needs. A true business will generate cash and I suggest you leave as much as possible inside the company until you need it – for an M&A or tough times.

Risk is part of the equation
Spending cash on growing the business is risky. There are no guarantees from my experience. You can make some bets that are more likely to succeed than others, but there is an element of risk in every growth decision. So if you can’t afford to lose the cash you are spending – don’t do it. I have lost money when I thought it was a sure thing, and had success when I expected less than stellar results. If you can’t stomach the risk – don’t spend the cash. But you won’t grow if you don’t take calculated risk. It is part of the equation. And some people just don’t deal with it well at all. Know your risk tolerance, and that of your spouse, before you go too far.

Profit is not bad – you are not taking advantage of your customer
I struggled with this reality for a very long time. My focus was on providing the maximum value as long as I didn’t lose too much money doing it. Profit was almost a bad word. Could I cut the price another point or two so they get a really good deal. Here is the reality – a failure in your business is not in the best interest of your customer. If you ask them if they prefer to save a few dollars and buy from you driving you out of business, or pay a little more to have a stable business partner, they will take the latter every time. No one wants to have to change IT providers because they saved a few bucks. Profit has to be part of the equation. In fact – you should start there – with the amount of profit dollars you want or need to clear and work backward to determine sales, margin and expense lines on your P&L to make sure you end up making money.

Profit should not be a mistake
Too often we just take the leftovers when it comes to profit. It is more of a hope and prayer than a strategy and planned outcome. That is the wrong way to run your company. You need to plan for it, expect it, and make sure you achieve it. When you do it should be celebrated through rewarding your team with some of the bounty. Profit doesn’t happen by accident. It requires planning and focus to achieve it every year!

Paying tax is a good thing
If you had told me 10 years ago I would write a blog with this sub heading I would have called you crazy. I ran my company for a long time with a goal of zero tax liability. Just break even so I didn’t have to pay the government any taxes. Now don’t get me wrong – I hate paying tax – but I have come to appreciate the fact that only profitable and growing companies are in a position to pay tax. And if you want to grow – continually producing a P&L with no profit is a limiting factor. Bankers are not crazy about lending money to non-profitable companies. There is no leverage to be had with zero as the result of a year’s work. We have to be wise in how we manage our income, but tax is not an evil thing. We need to make money which means we will pay taxes. That is just as reliable as the fact that we will all die someday.

Bankers are your friend
So many partners think of bankers as an adversarial relationship. I often hear the comment that “the bank won’t loan me any money when I need it”. That is exactly true. They are not looking for companies that are barely holding on by a thread and in need of a cash infusion. Banks loan money to companies that have a track record showing they will be able to pay them back. They aren’t looking for long shots or hopeful returns. You have to build a relationship and a track record if you want to borrow money for growth. Invest the time – build the relationship – give them access to your plans and numbers. They are critical for growth.

Here are some other ideas around getting cash in order.
• Conserve cash – don’t spend it all
• Get your bank credit lines expanded
• Update your vendor and distributor credit lines
• Clean up your financial house
• Evaluate your staff and trim unnecessary
• Evaluate all expenses and make cost cuts
• Talk with your team so they understand why taking care of cash and profits matter to them
• Create profit sharing options to drive the team to join the chase to generate cash

Cash does matter greatly if you want to grow. In fact, I will boldly say you won’t grow without it. Some are able to have some short term success without generating regular profits and cash – but it is unsustainable and won’t scale. The more you want to grow – the more cash you will need. And the sad reality is that many don’t learn that lesson until they need it for a deal or some other great opportunity and have to pass because they don’t have any. It isn’t rocket science. Cash matters – and it doesn’t come accidentally. Plan to generate cash and then manage it well. It is a critical growth factor – cash is truly king!

The Problem with Best Practices

HTG peer groups have been focused on best practice sharing since the first group was founded back in 2000. Those learning’s have helped numerous companies grow and become more successful in their markets. But over time we noticed that the value of best practice sharing seemed to diminish. Why? Ron Ashkenas wrote a great post on “Why Best Practices Are Hard to Practice” on Harvard Business Review online that explains some of the issues we found. Here are some excerpts from his excellent article:

“It would be easy to say that processes and tools cannot be picked up and moved from one organization to another. After all, each organization is unique — with different markets, commercial forces, structures, histories, leadership, and cultures. But if there weren't any universals, the sharing and transferring of best practices would be a waste of time, and there would be little learning across companies (or even within companies). But in truth some firms are exceptionally good at "stealing shamelessly." (In HTG we call it SWIPE – steal with integrity and pride every day). For example, think of all the companies that have benefited from Toyota's production model.

So why do some organizations succeed at utilizing processes and tools developed elsewhere while others fail? Here are two common pitfalls of applying best practices, and how to avoid them:

Lack of adaptation: The first pitfall is the temptation to take on a process or tool without tailoring it to the new environment. Because companies are so different, it is rare that a practice developed in one place can be applied elsewhere without significant customization. This not only requires learning the tool or process, but truly understanding the principles behind it. Practice comprehension calls for hard work — far beyond making road trips or sending a few people for training.

Lack of adoption: The second pitfall is to utilize a borrowed process or tool without full leadership support and commitment, as though just having the tool itself will generate the desired results. A former client at GE called this "the difference between doing it and really doing it." Often the wrong people are tasked with driving the process.

One of the characteristics of great companies is that they actively learn from others. But to be successful at doing this requires more than just identifying and borrowing best practices; it also requires adaptation to your culture and full adoption by your leadership. Without paying attention to these two steps, it is unlikely that best practices will actually be put into practice.”

To make best practice sharing valuable – HTG members have to learn how to adapt them to their situation. Seldom do you receive a best practice from a company exactly like yours. There are differences in your market, staff, skills, strategy, focus, management and on it goes. You have to take it and make it your own.

You also have to adopt it wholeheartedly. A best practice that is dumped on your staff to execute will become a failed practice. Ownership and executive management must drive best practice adoption by leading that charge. You can’t throw it over the fence and expect the right results. If you want it to work in your company, then you must own it until it does.

There is still much value to the learning’s we can glean from sharing best practices with each other. But the reality is that unless we adapt and adopt – there is no impact at all. And that makes it a matter of hallucination!

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!

Distribution’s Role in Success

This is the third blog post based on the keynote I delivered at the SMB Alliance event hosted by Ingram the end of August in Charlotte. The topic of this post is focused around the importance of distribution in the success of a VAR in the IT channel. This is based on our experiences in growing HTS and watching other successful VARs build their companies.

Distribution Was a Key Factor

At SCCI, my original company and parent organization today, we made a strategic decision to go deep with Ingram. Our purchasing is almost all done through this relationship, and our participation is primarily with their programs and resources. This decision was not about price. While their prices are competitive with the market, they are not necessarily the cheapest place to source products and services. On any given day you can call around and get better prices, that is if time is not of any value. The decision was based on value and the exact same fundamentals we preach to our clients every day. Don’t make decisions on price (if you do you probably won’t buy from us) but make decisions based on the value that we bring to the party. That is how we need to approach our distribution relationship. Focused on value.

So What Value Does a Distributor Bring?

For us it was based around four key areas:
1. Resources available
2. Investments made
3. Programs offered
4. People involved

There is no doubt that our “all in” decision has been a huge success factor. We have grown from less than $500K in 1990 when the relationship began to over $16M today and Ingram has been a key success factor in our growth. There is no doubt that we would be nowhere close to our current situation without that critical decision.

So How Have We Put the Pieces Together

Not only do we consolidate our purchasing, which gives us pricing but more important relationship, we take advantage of as many of the services and resources available to us as possible. Here are some that we leverage and have used to fuel growth:

1. Tech Support – our sales model leverages Ingram tech support to quote all our solutions or complex products. Every quote goes through tech support for solution validation. This gives us the ability to return product if it does not meet the customer needs. RMAs are down over 1.5% which is huge given our volume. No more long nights listing open box products on Ebay.

2. Solution Center – Our sales teams have made over a dozen trips to Buffalo or Santa Ana to leverage this resource. Every visit results in immediate and long term sales that are significant. You have the opportunity to expose your prospect or clients to a vast array of technologies in an offsite and highly focused environment and good things happen there.

3. Technology Assessment Program (TAP) – a mid market assessment tool that helps probe for opportunities. We have used this tool with over 50 of our clients and it always generates a long term strategy that leads to significant opportunities. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

4. IMSN – the Ingram Micro Service Network provides a mechanism to expand our service delivery. Both by receiving service tickets that drive revenue, and leveraging skill sets or engineering talent that we are not able to afford or don’t have available. They handle the transactional activity and we just do the work.

5. Communities – Ingram offers a number of these, most notably VTN and SMBA. Our company has grown significantly because of our involvement in these groups. They provide the opportunity to connect with peers and industry executives.

6. Agency Express and CAP funding – Ingram has great resources to help grow our company leveraging marketing investments made by vendors. These programs allow us to expand marketing resources and they work with us to create our own marketing plan. It is valuable and enables us to reach into the market with quality information and campaigns.

7. People – this is definitely the greatest value Ingram brings to the table. They have great people all over their organization that understand the channel and how to help us succeed. We leverage them for help with strategy and planning, procurement and marketing, sales and technical issues. They help us make things happen every day.

Far too many VARs get stuck on pricing and split their purchasing all over the place based on the deal of the day. My advice is to find a distributor you can partner with and go deep. Go all out. Make them part of your team and include them in your day to day business. They really can help you succeed. HTS and HTG are where we are today because of the deep investment we have made in Ingram Micro, and the equally deep investment they have made in us. We have many relationships that go 10 or more years deep and truly bring value that cannot be measured in dollars. So take a hard look at how you are doing business with your distribution partners. Are you really getting all you can from them? Or do you need to pick one and go deep?

The Go Giver Update

Yesterday I was blessed to be on blogtalk radio with Stuart Crawford and Bob Burg to discuss the book "The Go Giver". You can catch the show at this link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/smb/2008/09/19/The-Go-Giver

We spent a little over an hour talking about the 5 laws of stratospheric success and real world examples of how these principles can be lived out in life and business. It was a great discussion and one I encourage you to listen to.

Along those lines, this week at the Connectwise conference, I moderated two breakout panels where we discussed these principles as well. Serving and sharing their experiences were Brad Schow, Jeff Howard, Erik Thorsell, Stuart Crawford and Jeff Wood. These guys opened up their businesses and personal stories to help people understand that there is another way to live rather than blindly following the common wisdom the world shares with us. If you haven't read the book, please take time to do so, about a two hour read which is great for a plane ride. The bottom line is that these principles can really change the way you look at business and ultimately life. Being a contrarian often has some hidden value and can lead to even more success!

We are 1/3 done with 2008

Time to take a check on how things are going with your business plan. Did you realize that as we start May, we are 33% done with the year already. That means we need to evaluate where we are in comparison to our goals and make course adjustments as needed. Too many of us wait til way to late to try and make corrections to what is happening. We need to be watching our financials and other KPI's regularly and making adjustments along the way. If we don't, we get to July 1 or even much later and have to make huge changes to try and correct issues that have been present for a while but we just weren't paying attention. Then our moves have to be much more intense and bigger in scope to get the needed outcomes. If we make small changes along the way, we have longer for those to make a difference and move us where we want to be.

There are some key areas you need to be watching as you move through the year. One key area is to watch monthly at a minimum how your bottom line (EBITDA) number is tracking. It is important that you have established what a satisfactory profit looks like to you and then manage to achieve that number. Profitability should not be what is left over after all the bills are paid - it should be a planned amount that is required to have a successful year. Far too many of us just run our company and hope we come out with a profit at the end. We don't plan for it far less manage to achieve it. But as I watch successful partners, they know what they expect to achieve and manage to achieve it. They are not content with anything less and they make course adjustments through the year to make sure they hit that number. That same strategy should be used for other key metrics. I suggest you need a half dozen or so that you watch and manage against. But don't wait til Dec 15 to try and "save" the year. Now is the time to begin and to consistently do so going forward. Success is not an accident. It happens to those who work hard and have a plan. Then they execute against that plan and at the end of the year they have succeeded. It is a choice - so chose it and get to work!