Blogs

This blog results from the interaction of two issues that come up in business owner meetings-the desire for more work/life balance and the fear of being too much away from the business. If you research the history of work, it has only been in the last 100 years or so that work for most people has been done at some distance away from home. When the country was primarily agricultural, families lived and worked together on their farms and ranches. As cities grew, families lived upstairs from their shops and restaurants.

There are times in the life of every business when things are not going well and you are searching for a way to take control of circumstances. You want to generate the business you need to return to growth. You want the world to know about your new product or service. You just want to do something. This is the time when the dreaded Brochure Disease rears its head.

One of the things that characterizes many business owners is the passion they have for their companies. Passion is a good thing. It can sustain us in bad times, in the face of rejection and especially during those dark hours of doubt. But passion can also overwhelm prospects and scare them away. Too often, we get on a roll in a conversation and want the other person to know every great thing about all the things we can offer them.

Do you ever run into as situation that is difficult, thorny, complex and just plain unpleasant? Are you satisfied with the crispness with which you deal with a situation like that? By crispness, I mean gathering the facts, considering options, getting input from others and then deciding what to do in a timely fashion. The reluctance felt by business owners in dealing with these “monsters” is widespread.

More and more, B to B business owners are saying that they have never been busier generating proposals and never have they had to wait longer for decisions. Real economic experts will have to decide if this is a sign of an economy emerging from one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression. Whether it is or not, the activity-and the frustrating waiting is there. Can you imagine a time when trust between people was not important in doing business with each other? Can you imagine a time when it was any more important than it is right now?

Anyone who has been around long enough to have taken any of the fine courses offered by the American Management Association in the 60’s and 70s will remember the answer to “What is the role of Management?” That answer: “to plan, organize and control.” There was a tendency to assume that meant that managers were 100% responsible for these functions and employees were there to act accordingly. This blog is not necessarily intended to totally cast out that answer but rather to say that there has been a dramatic shift in and clarification of management’s role.

Winter may not yet be over, but those of us in the Mid-Atlantic region have had more than enough already. What did those of us who got snowed out learn about our companies during the big snows? Here are some lessons from various business owners about dealing with the impact of events like those snows and making future arrangements to deal with them better.

First, make sure you have some reserve funds available, either in savings or in your lines of credit. Your sales and deliveries may slow to a crawl, but your payroll and bills will not.

This is the subtitle of a research report delivered on February 24 at a workshop in Tyson’s Corner, VA that documents the reasons behind how high growth professional service firms do better in both top line and bottom line results than their average growth competitors.

One of the impacts of the current economic situation is thatconditions are making people believe that when we really emerge from what is going on, things will be much different than they were. More and more we hear business owners talk about the need to change the culture of their company.

In listening to business owners list strategies they have deployed to help change the culture of their companies, particularly after a merger with another firm, three themes emerge:

The World Wide Web is one of the most significant developments in the last century. The statistics on its growth and use are mind-boggling. Can you imagine life without it? No one blog, article, book or magazine could document its impact so this one will just focus on what the Internet is doing to the world of gatekeepers.