Resources to run a better business.

I heard this great story from a client the other day. Well, it wasn’t great for him. He was dealing with a significant problem in his business. The story is about seafood, shrink, and scorecards. Here’s what happened.

Once, several years ago, I attended a seminar on business development. This particular seminar was mandated by an organization I was involved in, and it was quite expensive. But I have a philosophy about ongoing education. I try to get just one nugget from everything I see, hear, or attend. And in this case, the nugget has guided my business development ever since.

Making excuses is a response for a perfectly natural, normal, caring individual. You want to protect your team. You want to stay positive. You don’t want to call someone out or make them feel bad. That’s really nice. I mean it. But niceness can be a problem. When you make an excuse for your team, you’re letting them off the hook.

Many of the entrepreneurs I know have a strong sense of urgency. It makes sense. It’s how they will entire businesses into existence. But as the business gets more complex, that sense of urgency can become a liability.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your team is the gift of understanding. Specifically, understanding why your company is doing what it’s doing. It’s annual planning season. That means leadership teams everywhere are putting in tremendous effort to shape the vision of their company for the next 12 months. But your leadership team cannot execute on that vision alone. If the vision is appropriately ambitious, you’ll need every employee to contribute in some way.

Join us for this one-hour webinar where we’ll reveal why a strong HR strategy is essential to maximizing your company’s value—and how to fix common HR mistakes that often scare buyers away.

Q: When should annual planning begin? A: Now if not sooner. Here’s the misconception about annual planning (and most strategic planning, actually). It doesn’t start on the date of your annual planning meeting. That session is extremely important, but it’s a time to align the team and prioritize together. If you walk into an annual planning meeting without a very good sense of what your goals will be for the next year…you haven’t done your homework.

“Morale is down.” No business owner wants to hear those three words. When employees have low morale, it affects customers and the overall growth of the business. In a toxic workplace, the reason for low morale is obvious. But if you’re a leader who tries to be kind (not necessarily nice) and generally has a good culture, you might be stumped about why morale is down. In my experience, there are three main reasons for low morale in an organization.

When companies are disciplined, they grow—provided they’re disciplined about the right things. In the commercial painting company I own, our sales team and project managers are extremely disciplined about three things: beer, lunch, and dinner. Yep, going out to eat is our primary marketing strategy. We track it as one of the top metrics on our senior level scorecard. It’s called the BDL.