Category: Peter Mehit
Get Serious! Get a Team. | Peter Mehit
Entrepreneurship is a process and not a goal; a journey, not a destination. Being a successful owner requires you to think about the future and manage the present at the same time. It means you need to take concrete steps to secure that future as early as possible while being willing to change your plans as opportunity dictates.
One of the first things you need is a plan. You should take the time to develop a formal business plan with realistic financial projections, but any plan that maps out your objectives and gives you a way to measure your progress toward them is better than no plan. Just as it’s difficult to build a house without blueprints, it’s even harder jumping into business without an idea of where you want to end up. The beautiful thing about plans is you can fix them if they’re not working. Without a plan, you’ll be left wondering what happened.
Until We Meet Again – Final Part | Peter Mehit
Ever drive to a mall and park your car and then after you finish shopping, you come back and you can’t find it? This gets worse if you own say a white Honda Accord, or a brown Camry. You look and look and look. And after all that searching and frustration, where do you find it? Exactly where you left it.
But parking lots can be a good thing too, especially if you can use them to park items that are going to crash your agenda. Here’s how it works:
You’re having your weekly status meeting. It used to cost $322. But because you started keeping time you were able to get the meeting to run and hour and ten minutes (about $250). Then we were able to save about $40 a meeting more by having people show for their part of the meeting and leave when they were done. We’re down to $210 per meeting (saving $112). How can you get that last ten minutes back?
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Until We Meet Again Part 4 | Peter Mehit
Where does the time go? No seriously, why can’t you store it up? Why can’t you borrow it from the future? Probably because we’d all be dead, having spent our future in replays and do-overs.
But fortunately, you can’t store or borrow time. You can only spend it. Instead of launching into a piece on the nature of man and time, I’ll instead supply you with some ideas on its wise expenditure when it comes to meetings.
You’ve done your agenda and selected the right participants, sending them the agenda early so they can have time to look at it. What’s next? Actually, we’re going to look at your agenda again.
Until We Meet Again – Third in a Series | Peter Mehit
I remember one time when I was going to go do ‘stuff’ with my friends. You know what ‘stuff’ is, right? Anyway, as I was going out the door, my mom called out, “Take your brother with you!” The presence of my little brother made sure that we would have to substitute different ‘stuff’ to do, much to the consternation of my buddies.
The fact that I don’t have a little brother shouldn’t take away from the main point of my anecdote; the participants in an activity will determine its outcome. Meetings are no different.
When you’re building your agenda, consider the participants you need to make the meeting work and only invite them. How do you know if they are the right participants? If the agenda topics are related to their ability to perform their job, then they are the right people. If they only have minor involvement, they should not be invited.
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Until We Meet Again part 2 | Peter Mehit
You’ve no doubt heard the expression that a person has a ‘hidden agenda’. We’re here to tell you the shocking truth. Everybody has a ‘hidden agenda’ and only a few people have an actual agenda. I know, I was scared too when I first heard this.
Are agendas important? You bet. Without one, meetings are unstructured discussions that will take longer than you expect and won’t deliver the results you want. With one, you’ll make millions and be ecstatically happy every day. Well, maybe not, but you’ll be happier than you would have been without one.
To be successful, agendas need to be:
Realistic – Can you really get to all the items on the agenda in the time you have? This is important because you always have to finish on time (more later).
Until We Meet Again part 1 | Peter Mehit
We all do meetings. We meet to status tasks. We meet to discuss strategy. We meet to make a decision. We meet to avoid making decisions. We…what? Meet to avoid making decisions? Yes, we do that, but that’s a different topic.
Meetings are part of business. They are among the most expensive activities a company can do, yet they aren’t viewed that way. Some simple math may convince you:
Weekly status meeting, 1 hour:
Position Salary with benefits
President $75/hour
V.P. of Operations $55/hour
Operations Manager $45/hour
Team Lead $28/hour
Buyer $25/hour
Cost for one hour meeting: $228/hour
Case Study: The Music Lovers | Peter Mehit
Everything that follows actually happened. I’ve changed the circumstances and identity of the people involved significantly, but the gist of the story is true. It’s at once proof of the old adage, ‘The truth will out’.
Sara and Tom have been friends since they worked on a successful advertising campaign for a major spirits producer. In their ten years as friends they’ve shared a lot: Holiday gatherings, the breakup of Tom’s marriage and their dreams of opening a music venue. Sara’s husband Bill was also good friends with Tom and supported their idea of opening the night club, up to the point pledging property he and Sara owned free and clear in San Francisco to secure start up money.
Because of their connections in the advertising and corporate worlds, Tom and Sara knew a lot of inside stuff. For example, they found out that a coastal city was pouring millions into a waterside development and had attracted several X Games type events to the area to take place in about two years time. Knowing this, the pair secured a lease on a large space in the heart of the development, negotiating a six month delay in rent payments.
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The Sharks Are In The Details | Peter Mehit
We frequently review contracts for our clients. It allows them to get another set of experienced eyes on an important document without the expense of an attorney. We read the document finding clauses and language that may be gotchas, referring them to an attorney for further review if needed.
We’ve noticed a trend recently. Contracts are becoming onerous, in some cases, predatory. We see this trend in everything from leases to service contracts to partnering agreements. Many contracts are becoming one sided in favor of the party writing them. We’ve seen an increase in otherwise smart business people being stung by outrageous contract provisions. They sign these agreements because they are assured they are the same as contracts they’ve signed before. The behavior we’ve seen falls into a few basic areas.
Fee death: This is where you are nickel and dimed for every possible charge that the contract maker can imagine. A client’s recent partnership agreement had an 80 – 20% net profit split in the client’s favor. However, hiding in the paperwork was a 40% overhead fee, tens of thousands of dollars in marketing costs and a bunch of small, mostly unnecessary, charges. The true net profit to our client was 19%. The deal was exactly the opposite of what the client expected.
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The Gift | Peter Mehit
Sometimes I see people on LinkedIn who stayed in their corporate careers. A lot of them are doing really well, but most stayed pretty much in the same job. Eleven years on, I sometimes have moments when I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed with the corporation, kept battling up the ladder. Would things have been different?
The ’08 crash wiped us out, financially and emotionally. Had we not had each other to hold onto, it could have done us in spiritually too. There’s no guarantee I would have ridden out that hurricane from the safety of a corporate shelter, but I thought several times, as I traded my house for an apartment and continued to push my ancient Camrys to the breaking point, did I do the right thing striking out on my own?
Dispatches From The Front 