Are You Weary or Wired?

Over the past 3 years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with business owners and their trusted advisors about their exit strategy. As baby boomers turn 69 this year, some of them express the excitement and exuberance of a 29 year old as they describe the business opportunities in front of them. And it’s true! There are many wonderful opportunities. Technology and the availability of information and education is allowing people all over the world to come together in new and innovative ways to do things that were impossible to imagine just 20 years ago, and the costs have plummeted, leveling the playing field for many. On the other hand, I find many owners who are weary of the demands of running their business. Fighting fires and dealing with customer issues, employee disagreements and unprofessional behavior. The cost of doing business is going up while the payouts seem to be going down. Consolidation is happening in every industry and small agencies are getting gobbled up by bigger ones.

Agency leaders are approaching their golden years and fewer young professionals are entering the field. Take a look around at your next business gathering or your next meeting of financial service professionals. In Greensboro, NC, we are fortunate to have one of the strongest chapters of the Society of Financial Service Professionals (SFSP) in the country with over 250 members and attendance of over 150 nearly every monthly meeting, and guess what? There is a lot of gray in the room! The industry is aging, as is most every industry in the country as the boomer wave passes through.

Are you among the wired? Or among the weary?

To opt out of business when you are filled with excitement and exuberance ensures a disappointing future as you will always wonder ‘what could have been?’, and the pain of regret is often more challenging than the pain of trying and failing. If this is you and you are giddy about what you can create and how you can grow the business, it’s time to create your roadmap for success:

Get strategic!

Excitement alone won’t grow your business. You need to partner that with a solid growth strategy. How will you reach new people, open new markets? Innovate your products or your delivery system? Create a clear competitive advantage and leverage it?

For an industry that’s been around a while, I like thinking through Jim Collin’s Hedgehog Concept in his best-selling book, ‘Good to Great’. He talks about figuring out what your company is deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at, and what drives your economic engine? These are great questions that form the foundation for an innovative strategy.

Surround yourself with Strong Leaders

You want to bring in and develop people who are (or can become) smarter than you, and who bring different areas of expertise. If you excel at sales, bring in someone who excels at operations. As long as you’re going to be around for a while, complement your skills and you’ll strengthen your team.

Execute

Great ideas are just that. Ideas. They mean nothing without execution. So figure out how to systematize, operationalize, standardize. Get effective AND efficient and you’ll discover you’ve got another value driver.

Does this roadmap cover everything the wired exuberant owner needs to focus on? No, but it will provide a strong foundation to build upon.

What if you’re weary?

To stick around the business, after you’ve lost your mojo, well, that doesn’t serve anyone. Your clients can sense you lost your mojo. Your employees know. And you know. If it just doesn’t hold the allure it once did, it’s time to take stock and build a ‘what’s next’ roadmap.

Acknowledge it’s Time for a Change      

You know you are ready to figure out an exit. Accept that it’s ok to want to go. Nobody ever expected you to work forever. Of course your customers and employees will worry about what will happen to them when you are no longer there every day, but that doesn’t mean you don’t make a plan to go. There are always options…if you plan. There are often fewer options if you don’t.

Confidentially explore 

Are there potential suitors you’d like to acquire you? Don’t assume the answer is no just because nobody has come knocking yet. Test the waters a little bit in safe and confidential ways. Awareness is amazing. We miss the hint or dismiss it as a joke. We make broad assumptions that nobody would be interested when in fact, they don’t know how to approach you. Take a look at your team. Do you have employees or family who could afford to buy you out? What about with financing and an earnout? Could they develop or hire the skills and experience needed?

Shift your Employee/Client Mindset

It’s easy to project our thinking on to other people. We anticipate our employees will run out the door if they know we are considering an exit. We expect our clients to take flight and find another agent if they even get a whiff that we may be passing the torch. We also assume that the only option is to keep our process so confidential that we are paralyzed. Might your employees leave? Yes. Might your clients find another agent? Yes. But most of the time, those extreme scenarios don’t play out…or they would have left anyway. When they do, the cause can often be traced to poor, disrespectful or total absence of communications. Most people respond well to transparency, business circumstances, and the commitment to strive for a win-win outcome.

Small Shifts – Big Difference

Whether you are giddy or weary, these small shifts can make a big difference – for your clients, employees and business, and get you what you most want. That sounds like a win – win – win – win to me!

Accelerate Results – Now and in the Future

My early career years were tough. As newly hired entry level managers with Procter & Gamble, we were given tremendous responsibility -- and we were expected to deliver! Most of my colleagues seemed to excel under that pressure. Not me. By about my 5th year with the company, I doubted my ability to reach the next level and I was worn out from the constant struggle to meet the new stretch goals. In year six, I took an opportunity to transfer within the company to a very different role in a different division. In this role, I had the opportunity to work with the senior leaders of the Laundry and Fabric Care business. I facilitated their leadership team meetings, ran the Strategic Planning process, spent much 1-1 time doing what I later learned was ‘Executive Coaching’ and marveling at the discovery through this work, that we all struggle with some level of self-doubt. Some of us are better at masking it than others.

I flourished in this new role and environment. Within a short period of time I was promoted and I started researching my discovery of the impact of negative self-talk and how that manifests in our culture.

A Strengths-based Approach

About that time, there was research coming out, based on work done by Martin Seligman, who is considered the Grandfather of Positive Psychology (University of Pennsylvania). Gallup had recently published Now, Discover Your Strengths (M. Buckingham and D. Clifton), which debunked the myth that our greatest area for growth is in improving our weaknesses. That was fascinating to me!

Instead, our greatest opportunity for growth and delivering exponential results (in addition to greater confidence and true joy) is in working to develop our strengths.

Later, Malcolm Gladwell’s research indicated that it takes 10,000 hours of disciplined practice to achieve greatness in a particular discipline.

Unfortunately, in our culture, it’s easy to stay focused on our weaknesses. We gleefully point out other people’s weaknesses – often not to their face of course, that would be rude! And we confidently put together a list of our own. Some of us willingly share those with others and some prefer self-torture. Many do both. That doesn’t do any good.

What I learned is that you, me, your staff, and everyone else has amazing strengths: skills you’ve built over years of growing your business; qualities and characteristics that are inherent to who you are, that come naturally in special situations and in your everyday life. The thing that makes your performance in those strength areas really special and unique is your willingness and commitment to identify, acknowledge, and develop those very strengths. They don’t become amazing on their own. Look at Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Steve Jobs. They all developed their strengths with hours of disciplined practice. Why not you? If you invest in developing your strengths and your staff’s strengths, you will transform your business, your culture and their lives.

What about weaknesses?

So what if your staff (or even you?) have weaknesses? Should you ignore them? No. Mitigate them. Make their impact on your business and life inconsequential.

Now, if you have an employee in a role where his weaknesses are truly holding him and the company back, you may need to make a change in his role and/or responsibilities or you may ultimately discover he’s not a fit for your company. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have strengths! It simply means the fit isn’t right. Allocate roles and responsibilities with strengths in mind and you’ll find your results and engagement soar.

Get started:

1. Identify your greatest strengths and then note the ones you most enjoy using. If you are stumped, think about the feedback people consistently give you.
2. Take a look at your team. What strengths do they have that are underdeveloped or underutilized?
3. Invest in an assessment to highlight and validate their strengths. Strengthsfinders is web-based and for $10, you can get a list of your top 5 from their set of strengths . If you want a competency-based leadership or management assessment, contact us for more information.
4. Invest in developing their strengths. Look for ways to re-allocate roles to better align strengths and responsibilities to maximize results.
5. Begin your 10,000 hours of disciplined practice to expand your impact using those strengths. So, if you want to be a better decision-maker, for example, figure out how you can leverage your strengths to do that.

This is a pretty seamless way to get your team engaged and performing at their best, which means your business is on the cusp of something big! I can’t wait to hear what you will accomplish by shifting to a strengths based approach in your business! Drop me a note and let me know how it worked for you!

How to Walk Away From Your Business…and still collect a paycheck!

Most business owners invest a tremendous number of hours in their business. From the day to day activities to making high level strategic decisions, there is never a shortage of work to be done. So how can you possibly walk away and still collect a paycheck? The more responsibility your management team takes on, the less you have to do. Of course giving your leaders more responsibility requires that you have highly capable leaders with enough capacity to take on more. And while it’s true that those leaders can free you up, you also have to be willing to let go. If this sounds enticing to you, read on!

Strengthening your management team

Assess them!

Whether you do a formal assessment or a back of the napkin look at your team, you need to be honest with yourself about what you’ve got. You need to evaluate their competencies, skills, attitudes, and the key behaviors against what it takes to make your company profitable. Do they have it? If so, are you using it? It’s amazing to me how often I find a highly talented underutilized resource doing 1/10^th what they are capable of! What roles and responsibilities can you give them that will maximize their effectiveness?

If your team doesn’t have enough of what you need, where are the gaps? You know what it takes to run your business – you’ve been doing it for years! You know the gaps that would show up if you took an extended vacation. Can you develop your employees and close those gaps? Could they be capable one day?

Hire or Develop?

My experience is that in most business owners are loathe to let anyone go who has been a good loyal employee, even if they don’t have what it takes to contribute more to your business. And unfortunately, most owners don’t have a budget to add more employees to their payroll to round out the gaps. They need a manager who can take on more. These are tough calls and there is no right answer. If you think you’ve got employees who have the potential to grow into a key management role, the investment in developing them is well worth it! If not, your loyalty may stand in the way of your ability to step away from the day to day.

Let’s plan to work with what you’ve got.

Build Bench Strength

When I talk to owners about building bench strength, I usually hear something about how they want to send their employees to training, but … ‘they can’t free up the time, or it’s too expensive, or I can’t find the right training, etc..’ Training can be highly effective for development, but it’s not the only approach. Why not consider how much they will learn through immersing them in broadening experiences. For example, send your key employee to spend a day or two with a non-competitive similar agency. The exposure to other work processes, culture, and methodology can be incredibly enlightening and pay tremendous dividends. Or give them a special project that forces them to engage with your business differently. Or support their participation on well-respected local or national non-profit board, or encourage them to apply for a seat in a Chamber of Commerce Leadership Program. All of these are powerful broadening experiences that will benefit your employee and your business. Of course, you must ensure they have a clear set of objectives and outcomes going in to these experiences, and you’ll want to debrief with them afterwards to make sure they get the learning you expected.

When you think about developing your people in this way, they will seize opportunities that you may not even know existed and reach potential you may never have recognized in them.

Let go.

So you did it! You developed your employees and they are doing a great job! Now it’s time to let go. You need to give them enough space to do what they are capable of doing. It doesn’t mean you abdicate responsibility, but it doesn’t mean that you tighten your grip, either. Will they make mistakes? Absolutely! Should you set up boundaries so the mistakes are not a catastrophe for the business? Absolutely! So what will it take for you to release a little bit? Maybe it’s up front meetings to discuss strategies and plans? Maybe it’s agreeing upon a set of boundaries or criteria -- within which they can make a decision -- and outside of which they need to involve you. Just be aware of a natural tendency you may have to negatively judge any action or decision they recommend, just because it’s different than yours. Your job is to help them learn, and to learn from them! They just might have a better idea!

Enjoy Baja … or Tahiti… or your house at the beach.

You’ve done well. Your business remains profitable – or maybe has become even more profitable. Your management team is running the show. You can check in periodically, give them a pat on the back, and maybe eventually, they’ll become your new owner.