When The Smartest Guy In The Room Is A Jackass: How To Lead Clever People

Exceptionally clever and well-educated employees possess ideas, knowledge, and skills what allow them to produce results far disproportionate the resources and responsibility made available to them. Every organization has at least one of these institutional headaches, and every one of them is too important to let go and to maddening to tolerate daily. While this puts a great deal of stress on you as a leader, when properly engaged, they can become powerful assets.
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Selling Coffee Next To Starbucks: Get Your Marketing For Free And Reap Record Profits

We don’t know about most of you, but we grew up in a small town.  There wasn’t even a stoplight, just a flasher, and even that was big news.  As you might imagine, this has led us to fear most things corporate and big box—our general store (this was in the 90s, we swear) closed down for good when the new Super Wal-Mart rolled in to town 7 miles away.

From TripleNetMarcus

But, dear small business owner, not every time you see the well-financed competition coming in to town, does it mean that you’re doomed to either sell out or shut down.  With a little marketing ninjitsu, you can use their presence to reap record profits and cut costs like never before.  How?  Learn From Starbucks

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10 Management Lessons From College Football

Business and college football don’t frequently overlap–at least not on the field–but the men managing those teams are every bit as prone to pitfalls as you are, and being in the business of leading makes for more common ground than you may have anticipated.  Just think, even more violent metaphors to use in that dull office banter!

10. Know When To Fold ‘Em

Bobby Bowden and Joe Paterno were, at one time, the two best football coaches in the country, regularly competing for (and winning) national titles.  But sometime in between the late 90s and now, these legends were seemingly killed and replaced by zombies that can only think about their next meal, instead of, say, NCAA compliance (Bowden) or getting out of the way of a speeding linebacker (Paterno).  The lesson?  You can’t always win, and it’s important to recognize when to step aside or bring in help–Coach Bowden has his successor on staff already, just waiting for the old coot to die.

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Breakout: Three Ways Small Businesses Can Snap A Cold Streak

If you’ve been in business more than five years, you’ve almost certainly dealt with it: revenues are growing, business is booming, and suddenly it all levels off. Anything can cause it—market saturation, new competition, multiple banks failing and threatening consumers with a new depression. This is one of the rare situations in life that it pays to treat the symptom instead of the sickness—what are you able to do about the economy? Is there a solution to market saturation other than finding a new market? Focusing on making your business immune to the problems at hand will yield far more results than trying to make the problems go away.

Increase Sales To Existing Customers
Even in a saturated market, it’s almost impossible to shut yourself out of resales—service industries especially have a simple route to this, as it’s only a matter of convincing customers that use your service once a year to use it every six months. Think of it this way—if 20% of your present clients bought from you twice as often, a 100,000 business is pulling in an extra 20K each year with no marketing costs and no new infrastructure.

Offer New Products And Services
Even if you’ve already made the leap in re-selling, you can always boost your sales by rolling out a new product. Your company already has a reputation that we hope is good, and you can use that to add credibility to a foray to a related product, service, or industry. Clean carpets? Start cleaning the couch, too. Mow lawns? Get into landscaping. Train clients? Start offering nice products to match your expertise

Refocus and Retrain On Core Competencies
This is more important than anything else—if you’ve built the processes in your business properly, go back and trace over them again. And again. And again. Have a sales force? Re-train them on their scripts and then have a criticism seminar in a week. Technical experts? Get some continuing education for them. When’s the last time you reviewed your presentation? You get the picture. Ace your core competencies, and almost any funk will go away.

Non-Productive Meetings and Endless Emails: How to Avoid Them (Like The Plague)

It’s happened to nearly all of us: you get called to an important meeting, everyone sits down and schmoozes a bit, there’s some unfocused discussion and by the time the meeting is over, you realize that not much was accomplished. Idle banter that goes on too long, lack of an agenda and unequal floor time between attendees can turn what should have been a productive meeting into a major time-waster.

The first step toward a productive meeting is having an agenda. Outline what you want to accomplish during the meeting, and e-mail it to all attendees a day or two ahead of time. That will give everyone time to think about how they can contribute to the topic at hand, and will give the group a sense of purpose. The agenda should list the topics you want to cover, in the order you want to discuss them. Re-state the agenda before the meeting starts as a refresher for the inevitable few who only glanced at the email.

Don’t schedule meetings right before or after lunch, or at the very end of the day. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon are best, since everyone’s energized and less likely to be distracted. You don’t want all of your employees daydreaming about sandwiches, falling over with post-lunch fatigue or watching the clock, itching to leave for the day. Definitely avoid holding meetings during a meal – it’s far too distracting.

Have an assistant take notes throughout the meeting. Not only will this provide a record of what was discussed and what ideas were brought to light, it will also help maintain an air of professionalism that will help discourage idle banter and side conversations.

The meeting must have a clear leader who guides the group through each topic, and encourages participation. Encourage everyone to participate equally – don’t let that one guy who just likes the sound of his own voice (or is trying to make himself look good) do all of the talking. Make it a point to ask the quieter attendees what they think, and prod them for their own solutions.

Give each attendee an adequate amount of time to talk, and limit interruptions. If you’re respectful of their opinions, they’ll be more likely to provide valuable feedback. You want everyone to feel safe expressing their ideas in front of the group.

Stick to the allotted time for the meeting. Ten minutes before the scheduled end, the meeting leader should mention that you’re almost out of time and begin assigning tasks based on the discussion. Setting goals will help ensure that the meeting will actually help you get something done.

Time after time, after meetings have ended, the boss (or meeting organizer) gets bombarded with emails from employees about things that were discussed during the meeting. A good way to avoid this is to have a quick follow-up Q&A session later in the day or the following day after everyone has had a chance to absorb the info and come up with questions. Getting everyone together for this also ensures you’re not hit with multiple emails asking the same question.

Announce the Q&A session at the end of the initial meeting, so everyone knows they’ll get a chance to have their questions answered and there’s no need to email. Keep the Q&A session short and sweet, so it’s not redundant.

Needle in a Haystack: Finding Great Graphic Designers for Your Small Business Who Work On Budget and On Time

Finding the right graphic designer can be tough, even for companies with huge marketing budgets. For small businesses, getting it right the first time is even more important – you don’t want to waste months working with a designer that’s totally wrong for your needs.

‘Crowdsourcing’ is a great option for small businesses. It’s a model of labor that takes tasks traditionally done by an individual or small group and sends them out to a global workforce. You set the price for your project, and designers will present their individual concepts. You choose the one that works best to refine the design. Each crowdsourcing site works a bit differently, but the basic concept is the same for all. Here are some of the best:

CrowdSpring.com – CrowdSpring deems themselves ‘a marketplace for creative services’, and you’ll find plenty of designers on here ready to get to work. As the buyer, you pay up front and CrowdSpring guarantees that you’ll get at least 25 entries to choose from or you get a full refund. CrowdSpring charges a 15% commission on all posted projects.

99Designs.com – Post a summary of your project and your budget for a $39 fee and graphic designers will respond with design concepts. You rate the designs, provide feedback and choose the winner within 7 days. The designer then sends you the completed design and copyright to the artwork. 99 Designs has over 11,000 designers as members and adds hundreds more every day.

DesignOutpost.com – Set your budget and pay in advance, and designers will compete to create the perfect design based on your guidelines. You can declare your own deadline, and give feedback to each designer during the designing process. All of Design Outposts’ designers are pre-approved to join the site’s ‘design team’.

For more crowdsourcing options, check out this guide on ReadWriteWeb.

Guru.com is a free service that gives you access to hundreds of thousands of creative professionals. You post your project and your budget and get bids from designers. Guru is a bit different from the other sites we’ve mentioned, as you choose who you want to work with based on their work samples and reviews from other businesses.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is another option for businesses that need an ‘on-demand workforce’. This web service allows companies to outsource simple tasks to a large team of virtual workers for small fees. It has 100,000 workers in 100 countries. Most of the tasks done by Mechanical Turk are repetitive rather than creative.

If you’d rather not use crowdsourcing for whatever reason, there’s always Craigslist. It’s not just for shady personal ads and $5 stained couches. Craigslist is a great place to find graphic designers, especially if you’re smart in how you go about it. Try putting ads up in smaller cities like Denver, Houston, Philadelphia and Phoenix rather than LA, NYC or Chicago to find someone to work virtually. Posting ads in these cities on Craigslist is free and you’ll be able to tap into a great pool of off-brand designer talent.

If you’re smart about spending your design dollars you can have more options than ever in getting your brochure/website/logo designed for your small business. Check references, lay out your objectives in as clear a way as you can, and it might not hurt to cross your fingers.

Good Ideas From Bad People: The Innovative Nature Of Blackwater

They never tell you this in B-school, but at the highest levels, sometimes business isn’t about innovation- it’s about being the best copycat.  It’s about Microsoft duplicating Apple’s operating system.  In the negative, it’s about GM and Ford continuing to build monstrous SUVs long after Toyota and Honda began to catch them in sales, and being primed for disaster when oil hit the roof.  Most of us have learned this lesson and readily swipe good ideas from good corporate citizens and industry leaders:  which company was the first to found their own charity?  Now that there’s Ronald McDonald House, Home Depot builds playgrounds in disadvantaged cities, and Nike has tried to take down cancer all by itself, does it matter?  But here’s the thing:  it’s not just the good guys that have good ideas.  As it turns out, you can be accused of muder and still have some great business models.

So, Obviously You Think Blackwater Is Doing Something Right?

There may not be any individual company that’s caught as much public ire in the past five years as Blackwater–after all, even Chevron and Microsoft haven’t directly killed people (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world/middleeast/08blackwater.html).  Despite that reputation, they’ve expanded from a 30-person firm in Moyock North Carolina in the late 1990s to a worldwide security firm with a permanent presence in three U.S. compounds and nearly 1000 employees in Iraq alone.  That sort of rapid growth always indicates one of two things:  a corporate culture worth imitating, or a business so corrupt and poorly managed that it will collapse under its own weight.  Killers or not, Blackwater might just have something to teach us., this case we’re looking at their use of 100-day projects.

How The 100-Day Projects Decentralizes Your Leadership, And Why That’s Good

Decentralized chains of command are wonderful things if you have the talent in your organization to pull them off–rather than filtering all of the decisions up the chain to the supreme boss, they all get made at the most local level, allowing the supreme boss (and all of the managers) to focus on important policy and leadership tasks instead of micromanaging.  This isn’t so much of an org chard decision as it is a culture that’s created, and it requires seriously empowering subordinates.

At Blackwater, they do that with 100-day projects. An employee sends an email to President Gary Jackson pitching an idea.  If that idea can be saving the company money or be making a profit in one hundred days, he greenlights it, no questions asked.  Why is this good?  For starters, it signals that your company is open to suggestions and willing to adapt–something that employees, or at least the ones you want, will be searching for if they’re serious about staying for a career.  It also ensures that no good idea or talented employee is buried in layers of bureaucracy, or has credit taken for it by a manager rather than the innovator.  Management gets to spend their time on more pressing issues, and the employees will love the newfound freedom to innovate and execute their own plans (or escaping prisoners).

Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Jackasses: Master The Art Of The Close

It may not feel like it—especially if your mother taught you any manners at all—but great salesmen are made, not born. Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross? Ben Affleck in Boiler Room? They may have been name-taking, ass-kicking machines by the time we saw them on tape, but every sales pro starts out as that kid that gets nervous going into a call or feels the need to hit the bathroom in between every cold call. Bear witness now to seven keys of closing that may or may not have come from Hollywood: [Read more]

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