Susana does some cool stuff – here’s a quick rundown from her:

We create intuitive user interfaces for web, mobile and software. Our user-friendly clients include Sprint, Hallmark and emfluence. Give us a holler at 816.561.2315.

Seductive Interactions

SlideShare’s “Seductive Interactions: An Art & Science” is an engaging presentation on design strategy. Of the 175 clicks I found click 85, most valuable – its title: What Do We Know About People?

Thanks for reading my hero story. Here is the Seductive Interactions show, for more novelty and surprises.

Thanks for the thoughts Susana

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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If you’re like most entrepreneurs, there are plenty of days you don’t feel much like a leader, but as a business owner, that’s a major part of your job description, a huge driver for success…or failure. Are you focused on being a great leader?

Leadership is needed in all kinds of places, it’s not just about business owners, it’s a universal requirement – it’s something everyone will step up to at some point in their life. Some feel they are called to lead in areas of high visibility while others may lead in areas where their leadership almost goes almost unnoticed but is important just the same. Teachers (or even our role as parents) are examples of unnoticed leaders, but effective leadership in those roles is profoundly important to the development of a child. 

As a business owner what your business really needs is effective leadership from you!

But what is effective leadership?  For the entrepreneur this timeless quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson gives us a great perspective:

“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”

It sounds simplistic, if you lead a company you need to be willing to step up and lead – blaze a path, make things happen. Your employees will respect and respond to effective leadership. Some may complain about it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t prefer it. In fact there’s a feeling of security when companies have strong leaders.

In order to respond to change or steer in a new direction you need to lead.  Or consider the alternative – with weak leadership your business will never reach its full potential, because your employees will not be performing at theirs. With weak leadership you’ll be average (at best). Your business will get lost, you will get lost.  But if you’re willing to step up and take charge, you may be amazed at what you and your team can accomplish.

Leadership doesn’t come naturally – at least to most people. To develop your leadership skills you need to work on them and make it an intentional focus. If leadership is important to you, it needs to be a continuous improvement area of your life. Accomplished leaders will tell you they are always searching for ways to improve their ability to lead.

Today, I want you to think about your business, your territory, your staff, whatever it is that you are responsible for “leading”. What can you do to make your leadership set you apart from others? Make it more effective? What isn’t working for you now? If it isn’t working, try something different today. Don’t overthink it. It can be simple, but take action. Be fair, consistent, and firm in your action. Be that person, step off the path…Lead!

Schedule a reminder on your calendar and share an update in the comments below in a few days; we would love to hear your “leadership” results.

Chris Steinlage    Kansas City Business Coach

photo by jimbowen0306

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One of my favorite guiding principles / quotes is:

“All things in moderation, including moderation.” (attributed to Mark Twain, but I can’t verify that).

This idea is one that keeps you centered – balanced across all of the different aspects of your life.  Let’s face it, as a business owner you wear a lot of hats – both in the business and out of the business.  You are the leader, the face of the business, probably the guy emptying the trash can…and on top of that, you’re a spouse, maybe a parent, a member of your church, a neighbor, a friend and possibly lots of other things.  If you let one of the roles you play become too dominant, all of the other roles will suffer.

Think about a workaholic that you know – maybe it’s an entrepreneur, maybe it’s a corporate hard charger trying to get up the ladder.  In either case, you might admire their capacity for hard work and possibly you admire their results or their success, but it’s unlikely that you envy their life overall, they aren’t in balance (and it’s not sustainable in the long run.).

This idea of having and embracing clear cut roles in your life is important when you start thinking about your planning for next year.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of recognizing your self-limiting beliefs as an important precursor to planning.

Along the same lines, it’s just as important to take time and recognize the important roles that you play and that you want to develop for the next year.  By identifying your roles, what’s important to you and makes up who you are, you can make insure your planning incorporates a balanced look across everything.

Let’s take a look at what happens if you ignore the roles in your life.  Think back to a time when it was really important that you made something happen at work – you start working long hours, you’re really focused on the job at hand and other things start to slip.  You stop going to the gym (who has time).  You don’t see your spouse much…but she understands right?  It’s okay that you’re not around…at least for a while!

You can see how that approach will play out over time.

However, if you can identify ALL of the things that are important to you in the long run, then you can start addressing each of your roles so you stay in balance.  (Moderation in all things…)

Getting started on your roles and planning:

As part of your planning process, identify 7 or 8 major roles you play or should be playing in your life.

Which of those roles is the MOST important thing you want to focus on for the next year?  Not to the exclusion of everything else, but something has to be your priority and this is a good chance for you to identify where you’d like to make some real headway in your life. 

Is this the year that you get healthy and make that a real priority?  Maybe you’re launching your business and that has to be number one.  Whatever it is, it should be the most important thing to you – with the recognition that it’s just one of 8 hats that you’re wearing.

Now come up with at least 2 or 3 goals for each role that you’d like to achieve in the next year, maybe you have more than that, but the important thing is to think through it and get it all out on paper.

That’s going to leave you with a huge number of goals – which is also a sure recipe for failure and a quick path to feeling overwhelmed…totally not the point!  So the next step is to look at that entire list of goals and prioritize it down to a top 10 list!  Ideally that top 10 will be spread out over all of your roles – likely weighted towards your highest priority.  If you could achieve all 10 of those goals, you would have a great year!

With your 10 most important goals to focus on, and an ongoing awareness of all of your roles and responsibilities, you’re now in a position to really be effective going forward.

To really stay on track, I’d recommend an ongoing checkpoint (maybe monthly, but probably weekly) to make sure that you are staying focused on your top 10 goals (and nothing else…) and spending time and energy on each of your important roles (staying balanced).

Have you factored your roles into planning and goal setting before?  What roles are you overlooking?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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There’s a popular business saying that “What gets measured gets done” – it’s attributed to Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and other business management experts.

On the surface, it’s a common sense kind of statement – obviously if you aren’t measuring specific results, you can’t manage the outcome…picture playing a fast-paced basketball game where score isn’t kept, at the end of the game should you hold onto the ball and work the clock?  Or should you foul the other team and try to score as quickly as possible?  Without a score there’s no way to tell.

However there is an implication there’s a clear answer of what needs to be measured.  I would suggest that for many small business owners, what should be measured may not be obvious.

Most business owners, if they measure anything, measure revenue, profits or some combination…and often that’s all they really measure.  Sometimes this has an unexpected effect on how employees behave (especially if they are compensated on what’s measured). 

As an example, if you’re measuring only top line revenue, the implication is that the most important thing is to increase sales at any cost…even if it’s low or no margin business.  (Will you make it up in volume???)  For most business owners, that’s not really the most important thing, but it’s not always clear what should be measured (and used for incentives).

I recently finished Simon Sinek’s book Start With Why, which has a lot of great ideas in it, but I especially enjoyed one of the last couple of chapters where he illustrated some different ways of business owners measuring key things.

Measuring Thank Yous

The first example he shared was a collections agency – Bridgeport Financial, created by Christina Harbridge who started with the idea of some other way to help companies collect money than the traditional harassing tactics that are the industry norm.  She believed people will respond positively when treated with respect and integrity.  So instead of measuring and incenting employees based on the amount of money collected, she incented them based on the number of thank you notes they sent out.  Ultimately she created a culture that valued and listened to individuals – despite the fact that they owed money.

The result?  Bridgeport collected more than 300% over the industry average!  Even better – the people in collections ended up doing more business with the companies they owed money to…they felt respected and valued and responded by paying what they owed and doing additional business!  Not a typical outcome for a collections situation!

Measuring Quality of Life

A lot of businesses will talk about how they value work-life balance, but very few really make that tangible.  However, Honoré Construction in Louisiana has found a way to reinforce their core value of the importance of family by measuring and enforcing time spent at work.

Employees are required to clock in between 8:00 and 8:30…and required to clock out by 5:00 and no later than 5:30.  If they are working outside of those hours, they forfeit the opportunity to participate in a bonus sharing program!  This approach has built in a sense of urgency during work hours…the employees have a hard stop every day and know they have to be productive while they’re at work.  And they can enjoy their time outside of work, knowing they’ve done a great job for a company that values their time!  Productivity is high and turnover is low…clearly strong results!

What do you measure?

Are you encouraging any particular behavior in your business?  Could you start measuring one of your key core values?  Would it conflict with profitability as the most important thing?  There’s nothing wrong with measuring profits and revenues…in fact I would argue you can’t successfully run your business without that kind of visibility.  But that doesn’t mean it has to be the bottom line driver for what you’re all about…in fact as shown by the examples above, you may be better off by finding WHY you do what you do and measuring up to that.

Do you have any examples of companies that measure some different things?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s important at your company – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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Business growth can be a scary proposition…obviously it’s better than business failure, but there are a whole set of fears centered around business growth and success that plague a lot of business owners.

When your business starts succeeding beyond where you’ve been for a while, you leave your comfort zone…you head into new territory (which is scary).  Maybe it’s a situation you haven’t faced before (also scary).  Maybe it will require you to do some things you haven’t had to do before…hire more people, find a new location, spend more money (on people, stuff, rent, etc.).  And maybe it will force you, as the business owner, to do things differently…not do as much hands on work and to do more strategic leadership and planning.

All of that can be scary stuff – but I would propose there’s a better way to look at it.

I had a great conversation with a client last week who’s facing some great opportunities, including bringing on a significant new client that could be a 50% jump in revenue if it all played out.  It’s  all exciting stuff, but there was a real undercurrent of fear and tension as we talked about the need to bring on some additional help.

It boiled down to “How can I possibly afford to bring on that many people?”.

It’s a fair question, but it’s the wrong way to look at things because it will shut you down before you even get started.  It sounds silly (especially if it’s not you in the hot seat), but changing your mindset…changing your perspective can make a huge difference, even though none of the underlying facts change.

What if you look at all of the things associated with growth as investment opportunities that have a tangible return on investment as opposed to a cost of doing business?

As an example, the exercise that helped my client turned out to be some simple calculations of how many billable hours her clients would likely need in the next 6 to 12 months that would go to the new company resources.  To keep the math easy, let’s say it’s a 1000 hours of new work and the margin on each hour of work could be $20 to $40 an hour (depending on who and what they were doing).

Just using quick math and these assumptions – her margin on these new resources is going to be $20,000 to $40,000 each just in the next year, on the low end!…and almost all of that goes straight to the bottom line without hardly any extra time spent by the business owner.

That’s the beautiful leverage of a successful business.

Clearly there are a lot of things to take care of and watch out for.  You have to find the right people, you have to manage the relationships and the overall level of work, you have to have a clear idea of what’s next and how you can continually improve your business.  But you ought to be doing all of those things anyway – that’s your job as the business owner. 

So the next time you have a chance for growth…make sure you’re approaching it with an investment mindset and not getting wrapped up in the costs and challenges.

Have you ever been scared by growth or success?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

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