Don’t Let These Barriers to an End-Client Mentality Ruin Your Consulting Firm | Business Tips

May 4, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

In the consulting world, one rule reigns supreme: It’s all about the end client.

If you’re not scrutinizing your client service, satisfaction, and delivery on a daily basis, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to survive and thrive in the business world. Still, catering to your end client can be more difficult than it appears, especially when you’re juggling both buyers and influencers.

As a result, many consulting firms think they’re focusing on client satisfaction when, in reality, they’re just hiding behind rhetoric. It’s amazing to see the huge variations in quality, process, responsiveness, and overall experience among individual consultants.

For example, one consultant I work with excels at collecting feedback and clarifying expectations with all parties involved. He has formal and informal processes in place to gather this information, and he uses it to refine his engagement strategy with a client. On the other hand, I’ve seen consultants make empty promises on savings they can generate and problems they can fix without any input from the vendors involved. Not only does this create friction, but it also shows your client that you don’t value her relationships.

This disconnect between a consultant and a client can take many forms, including:

Need a Better Way to Confront Problem Employees? | Biz Action

April 30, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Understanding how to have a productive confrontation begins with a quick self-assessment. Do you:

Shy away from the problem and hope it will solve itself, or, the other extreme,

Take employees to the proverbial “wood shed” and vent your frustration or anger, without thinking it through carefully in advance?

The former requires living in fantasy land and will get you nowhere. The latter will only make matters worse.

Motivating yourself to become skilled at productive confrontation begins by thinking through the nature and impact of the problem(s) you seek to address. Sometimes they run deeper than you might think.

For example, if an employee fails to give you a report you need in time to prepare you for meeting with a big customer or prospect, what is the impact? If it’s that you hold the meeting without the facts and analysis you need to make a successful presentation, and you lose the customer or prospect, that’s a high price. But it’s not all that’s at stake.

How to Tactfully Drop a Client | Business News Daily

April 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Most service-based businesses have encountered a nightmare client. This person makes outrageous demands of your team and expects them to be met yesterday. He or she doesn’t respect the due date on the invoice and refuses to pay you on time. And when it comes to communicating with your company, this client either pesters you 24/7 or can’t be reached at all.

The old cliché may say that the customer is always right, but these difficult clients are usually not worth your time, frustration and, as may be the case, lost income. Although you may be hesitant to drop or “fire” a client, it could very well be in your business’s best interest in the long run.

“For a [business] relationship to have long-term success, both parties have to be in a position to do their very best possible work,” said Matt Dopkiss, co-founder of digital marketing agency Dynamit. “If the frictions overpower the momentum, the relationship will grind to a halt. You usually know it far in advance, but you’re reluctant to admit it. You rationalize, you put in extra effort, you try to stay optimistic — but once the chemistry is gone, it’s over.”

7 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Payment Processor | Small Biz Trends

April 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

So you want to run an online store. Congratulations — and best of luck to you.

One of the more important things you need to do is figure out how you want your shoppers to pay for the products they buy on your site. In short, you need to find a payment processor, the company responsible for moving the money from your customer’s bank account or credit card to your business account.

Many companies are out there vying for your business.

Choosing the best payment processor for your business is an important choice. Many sellers gravitate toward the lowest bidder. Keep overhead low and the profits will roll right in, right?

Not necessarily.

When it comes to choosing a payment processor, focusing on the lowest bidder can be a big mistake — but only one of several mistakes. When choosing a payment processor, there are seven mistakes you should do your best to avoid:

22 Mistakes Made by Sellers in M&A Transactions | All Business

April 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

Selling a company is often difficult and time consuming. The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) process is one that requires careful planning, competent professionals assisting the target company, and an understanding of the deal dynamics involved in the negotiations. CEOs and companies that have not been engaged in many M&A transactions frequently make mistakes that can result in a less favorable price or terms that would have otherwise been obtainable —or even kill the deal altogether.

The following is a list of common mistakes made by private companies attempting to sell themselves:

1. Not being prepared for the extensive effort and time the deal will take. Successful exits through M&A are not easy. They are time consuming, involve significant due diligence by the buyer, and require both a great deal of advance preparation as well as a substantial resource commitment by the seller. Acquisitions can often take 6 to 12 months or more to complete.

The 3 Skills You Need to Lead Organizational change | Page19

April 28, 2015April 29, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

What happens when a culture is wrong? What does it take to change it? One thing’s for sure: you’ll need a deft leader. A new book by Roger Connors and Tom Smith, Change the Culture, Change the Game, tells how to effect cultural change within organizations.

You hear it all the time. Article after article, blog post after blog post talks about company culture or company DNA. These words were chosen because they represent something intrinsic and nigh-unchangeable. But what happens when culture is wrong? What happens when the DNA is bad?

Well, if you’re a species, you probably go extinct. Ouch. Obviously for a business, this is not an ideal result. So let’s say that you’ve identified a feature in your organization’s culture that needs to change. If it’s really in your culture—in your company DNA—it’s going to take more than a memo to change it.

Until We Meet Again part 2 | Peter Mehit

April 27, 2015April 27, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

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).

Continue reading “Until We Meet Again part 2 | Peter Mehit” →

Success Is Controlling How You Spend Your Time | Inc.com

April 27, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

I blew the mind of one of my Babson College students this morning.

Like most people, he believes that success is measured by how much money you have and how much money you make. By that measure, there is no single individual who is the world’s most successful.

After all, Bill Gates–whose net worth totaled $79.6 billion according to Forbes’s January 29, 2015, tally–probably has the most money, but I sincerely doubt he makes the most money every year.

That title probably goes to a hedge fund manager. For example, Ray Dalio–who runs $120 billion (assets under management) Bridgewater Associates–pulled in a cool $3 billion in personal earnings last year, according to Forbes.

But if you believe that success means both having the highest net worth and getting paid the most every year, then neither Gates nor Dalio is successful.

That’s because the pursuit of the most wealth or the highest annual income is success only if you keep winning every year. Otherwise, you are going to spend time trying to figure out how you can get to be number one–rather than taking pleasure in what you have achieved.

Google Is About to Make Your Wireless Carrier a Lot Less Relevant | WIRED

April 24, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

GOOGLE’S NEW WIRELESS phone service, Project Fi, offers a long list of modern day perks. It automatically moves phones between traditional cellular networks and the WiFi wireless networks inside homes and businesses. Once on WiFi, you can still make calls and send texts. And you can pay for all this in small, flat, monthly fees—avoiding the sort of inflated, strings-attached pricing that so often accompanies our cell services.

Three Strategies to Engage Your Clients | Getentrepreneurial.com

April 24, 2015 ~ knjohn ~ Leave a comment

“What have you done for me lately?” is the client attitude du jour. And by “lately,” they mean very recently. The number of client experiences with and impressions from your competition expands daily with a multitude of tech-driven access points.

Client engagement—from relationship to results—is a key to your increasing sales with greater productivity to get out of the office earlier to do what you love with those you love.

How do you strategically engage your clients?

Here are 3 Strategies to Engage Clients for more business:

Be Initiating