Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Business ESP

You can’t communicate with employees through ESP no matter how hard you try. And I’m not kidding. Sometimes we act like everyone should just be able to figure out what we’re thinking, and it happens all the time. If Ideas and requests aren’t properly communicated they’re not going to be understood.

I had an employee who was rolling into work late, sometimes an hour late or more. I would stew about it. It would frustrate me and I just didn’t know why it was happening. Turns out, after I decided to lay down the law about it, that he actually didn’t know when work formally started because no one had ever told him. Thinking back on it, I know I didn’t say anything about a specific clock-in time and no one else had mentioned it either. Wow. I made a big mistake by thinking that an employee could somehow get inside my brain and know what I was thinking. And this doesn’t just happen with employees. It happens with business partners, suppliers, customers, and just about everyone else I encounter during a business day.

Of course communication is the missing piece here. Things have to be spelled out. It’s not because people are dumb or inept or anything like that. It’s because everybody is different and they all have different perspectives and ideas. It’s immensely helpful to sit down with someone, no matter who they are, and simply communicate. Maybe you’re better about this than I am, but I find that there is a constant need for more complete and basically better communication.

This goes the other way too. Sometimes people aren’t communicating their ideas to me. Maybe they don’t want to say something critical to their boss or maybe I’m simply not listening as I should be. It’s vital as a business owner, I think, to ask people what they’re thinking. I mean really ask, and be specific. Bad communication is a big roadblock to successful business and it takes constant attention to always maintain proper communication.

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Logo Agony

I’m a designer’s worst nightmare. With a background in graphic design, marketing, and corporate communications, I had particular and robust ideas about what I wanted. Okay, I’ll admit to being a recovering perfectionist as well, and doubtless that contributed to the lengthiness of the process. The actual passage of time was perhaps not unusual, but the many fits and starts and the angst surrounding them are unforgettable.

Entrepreneurs setting out to start a new company, in my opinion, would be wise to set aside a hefty budget for graphic identity. I did not. I wanted world-class design, however, and that is where Logoworks came in. Headquartered in Utah, Logoworks caters to small businesses. It designs logos, business cards, and websites inexpensively by using top-notch designers who never have to actually speak with clients. Instead, all communication takes place via formatted e-mail and account coordinators who do have to speak with clients.

What gave me pause was the distance (Cape Cod is more than a walk to the beach from Utah) and, more important, the consequent lack of day-to-day rubbing of elbows. In the end, I came away thinking the Logoworks formula is actually superior to working with one local designer, who would have had competing priorities. At each step of the way, it is spelled out how the process will work and how long turnaround times will be for each revision round.

The package I purchased from Logoworks included unlimited revision rounds for logo design. And it’s a good thing. Because when it came to satisfaction with the early concepts, I was less than enamored. Granted, my list of “theme” words was far-reaching: sophisticated, no-nonsense, innovative, light-hearted, new, fresh, natural, beautiful, intelligent. I also specified that the logo must not even hint of anything related to women’s cosmetics – no lipstick cases, no brushes, no frills. A tall task, indeed.

At the end of an arduous process, with many visions and revisions, I loved my logo and I love it still. It worked with business cards and packaging and printed materials and website and more. But, please, you be the judge. Does it do what I wanted?

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Stay Focused. Be Flexible.

Understand that your business, your product, your marketing, even your life won’t turn out the way you planned. I think one of the big challenges with a start up business is, knowing whether to act on a new idea immediately or put it on the shelf for later. The problem is, some great ideas can take you away from your focus on your current goals. New business owners can hop from one suggestion to the next, making significant changes after getting the company started. This wastes time and creates additional expense that you need to avoid. Ask yourself, “is this new idea or suggestion helping the business to reach it’s goals or diverting valuable resources away from these goals”. However, once in a while, an idea or suggestion comes along that must be embraced and acted upon immediately. Your minds and plans must be flexible enough to make those critical changes.

So stay focused, be open and plan for some changes.

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What’s your process?

My bread-and-butter consulting comes from doing business analysis of process. There are about 3 main things to avoid when designing business process - and almost every client I work with has violated these rules…so I thought i’d put these out for you to think about.

1. Don’t replicate something you can reuse. I have a client that supports their products with 2 different processes. One process if you call their call center. A completely different process if you order via the web. The customer experience is VASTLY different, depending on the channel you choose, but the product you receive is the same. It costs the client twice as much to support their product, because they’ve replicated their entire product support infrastructure twice. This also illustrates one of my favorite tenets of the “new” web economy: Putting a traditional business on the web will usually highlight the poor business practices of the business…because now all the internal workings of customer service are now exposed to the customer.

2. Avoid audits & inspections. Any time you have someone checking someone else’s work - this is ALWAYS a waste of time. One client has 80 people performing a check of sales orders - rejecting those orders back to the sales people to correct them. Better process design would be to enforce some edits on the sales people’s order forms so that they can’t make bad selections…that way, you don’t have to check them. While this example isn’t quite so extreme for small business - it should illustrate that good process design will ensure that work gets done right the first time - instead of inspecting it into the back end - at additional cost.

3. Avoid handoffs - collapse the job responsibilities. Your customer is the ONLY focus you should keep as you design your customer service process. If you hand off from an ordering clerk, to an inventory clerk, to a shipping clerk, to a billing clerk as part of your fulfillment process, you run the risk of providing poor customer service. Many times, each department will insist upon the “longest interval” as their agreement to provide service. If each department listed has an “allowed” 72 hour turnaround, there will be a 12 day lag before your customer is served. Better process design would collapse the job responsibilities (with more training) to a “customer service agent” that can handle the transaction from initial order through to billing fulfillment. That way, inefficiencies of handoffs are avoided, and your “customer service agent” can ensure that the customer has been truly served.

A business is nothing but a collection of it’s processes. Make sure yours are designed to take care of your customers - not your internal groups.

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Hiring the right resources

I thought I’d write a bit about hiring the right people. I read Mike’s blog entry about hiring, and I wanted to add a few comments on that subject.

Our business is defined by knowing and hiring the right resources always. The best source for quality people is always from the personal network - as most of our best resources come from those we know. Quality people tend to know other quality people, and there’s still no substitute for personal recommendation.

However, when you can’t rely on the network connections for people, I thought I’d pass along some screening tips I learned as a recruiter during my stint in Big 4 consulting.

We had a pre-screen interview (30 minutes or less) and it had 4 questions on it. I think those 4 questions are able to identify the best quality candidates, and here’s why:

Question 1: What does the company do? This question demonstrates that the candidate has at least done some research about your company, and may even demonstrate some surprising understandings based on what they might find out about you. You can judge interest and understanding from this question.

Question 2: What extracurricular leadership activities do you take part in? Everyone has a “day job”. That may be as a student (if you’re doing new hires), or a current position (if you’re hiring an experienced candidate). If someone is willing to devote their time & talent outside of work to something else (in a leadership role), then that person may have leadership qualities you can tap into. If the person is neighborhood garage sale coordinator, soccer coach, youth club leader, or any other leadership activity, this demonstrates two things that are valuable: Leadership, and initiative - both vital qualities in a successful candidate.

Question 3: How many hours do you work in a typical week? For new hires, we determined that a full time student that also held a 20 hour/week job (regardless of the nature of that job), showed the ability to schedule, time manage, and demonstrate responsibility. This question is obviously geared for student recruiting - but the same can be applied to experienced hires as well, just with different frame of reference. Ask those questions that demonstrate the ability to multitask, or hold a disciplined work schedule (ask anyone with kids this question, and you’ll know what I mean).

Question 4: Tell me about a time when you were NOT able to perform a task you were instructed to do. What did you do? This question is one designed to reveal their problem solving ability. You will learn a lot about the person based on the situation they explain to you (can they even explain themselves well?). The solutions to overcoming their difficulty will tell you something about their ability to solve problems for you. Answers like “I got help” or “I researched the problem until I found the answer” are generally good, while “I quit”, “I yelled at the customer because they were stupid”, “I told the boss to deal with it”, (all answers I’ve received in interviews) may not indicate the best person for the position.

These 4 questions typically take about 20 minutes, and can tell you the factors about an employee that have the best indicators of success: Interest & Understanding, Leadership, Initiative, Time Balancing, Scheduling, Responsibility, and Problem Solving ability. You’ll also likely be able to assess if the person would be a good fit with the team that you’ve already got in place, because those same skills you’re interviewing the candidate for, will also be valuable skills for fitting in with your current team.

I’ve seen fancier interview techniques, but these 4 questions seem to be an accurate indicator of success in my field, and I think you’ll see that most of these traits are the ones that are the best indicators of success in any field.

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