The Agile Scaleup

Raising Bill Gates; Changing Quarterbacks; Innovating the Daily Huddle Part 2

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Raising Bill Gates -- Gate's dad shared with Fortune an exclusive excerpt from his book "Showing Up for Life" -- worth spending three minutes reading, especially to learn Gate's parent's reaction when he decided to drop out of school. And I didn't know he was always known as Trey in his family and had launched a business before Microsoft.

Embracing Change and Stability -- below are two quotes by leadership professor Dr. John Kotter -- re-read a couple times.

Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change.

Managers promote stability while Leaders press for change; and only organizations that embrace both sides of that contradiction can thrive in turbulent times.

Power of Daily Huddle -- Jake Jacobs was the first one to point out to me that the power of the daily huddle is that it provides a sort of "radical" stability to help drive/survive radical change. Thus it's a critical tool for both managing and leading the business.

The SUIT Agenda -- George Contos, CEO of New Jersey-based World Wide Metric, has added a twist to the standard daily huddle. Noted Contos in a recent email "We have been doing the daily huddle for the past 5 months. We stand in the conference room, no paper, no coffee...just our brains and our hearts...12 min max. We go thru the same thing every day, what we call SUIT: -Sales- Updates -Issues/bottlenecks - Topic
Some days we don't have any updates, issues, or even a topic and we are done in 2 minutes. I found I was running out of topics and my team was not really bringing up the issues.

Rotating Quarterbacks -- continues Contos, "So what I decided to do was have a new quarterback (as we call it) run the Huddle every week on Wednesdays. Every member of the team has to run the huddle and present a topic for discussion/learning. During the week prior they come to me with the idea and we work together to focus it, hone it and make it clear and simple and not complicated. This is our 3rd month doing it. I could never have planned for the kind of results we are now getting."

Peer to Peer Accountability -- "I am not talking about sales either. The peer to peer accountability....the topics that are chosen are their topics which benefit the team...they are excited to do this and want to do a good job. And they are getting more confident. They are coming to me now weeks in advance of their turn to get started on their topic. Now, finally in the past few weeks the level of trust has come so far that we are having debates and conflict and challenging each other in dialog to do better. And now we are!"

Change Things Up -- I asked Contos if this caused the Wednesday meeting to go beyond 15 minutes. Responded Contos, "Yes they go over, sometimes...mostly because a discussion begins....I encourage it. As long as the phones don't go crazy we carry on for up to 20+ minutes and that may happen on regular days as well. I think the Wednesday meetings changed things up and added a sense of diversity. Plus the more time the team spends together the camaraderie grows...the sharing grows and we're starting to have breakthroughs together." Concludes Contos, "Business has changed. We have to work smarter and more strategic... everyday."

Contos is tackling complexity and driving change using his meeting rhythm. It can do the same for you.

Daily Huddle Improvement; Risings' 10th; Market Date More Powerful than Product Data; Customer Calls

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Law firms using Rockefeller Habits -- are you having success implementing the habits in your law firm? Let me know -- I have another law firm interested in picking up some hints on implementation.

Market Data more Powerful than Product Data -- to dramatically increase leads and improve close ratios, share market data vs. product data about your product or service -- here's a short 48 second clip where Chet Holmes describes this concept. He also describes the "Stadium Pitch" in this 30 second audio clip. He'll elaborate on these and ten other strategies for doubling revenue -- tune into his four hour video webcast live Tuesday, April 21, 9am -- 1pm EST or join us in New Orleans for the Sales Summit.

Daily Huddle Hint -- Getting Employees to Share "Stucks" -- Randy Sklar, President of Sklar Technology Partners, had a major breakthrough in their morning huddles. Note's Sklar "Your format starts with 'What are you stuck on?' Every day I ask this question and often I get almost no feedback - then one day I learned that one of our technicians had been stumped for several days on an issue and finally reached out for help from another senior tech. We started to dig into how this happened." Continues Sklar...

"The senior tech suggested to me to ask the question differently, he said that when we ask what are you stuck on it sounds like 'what are you failing at.' There is a lot of competition to be the best in our group and no one wants to admit failure. Now we ask 'what have you been working on for at least one day?' and the results have sounded like music. More are speaking out. It might be because we faced the brutal fact and made admitting to failure okay or maybe it is just our culture that makes the 'stuck' part fail." Randy, thanks for sharing -- and thanks for having us speak at your supplier (Ingram) conference.

NationLink Wireless Completes 150 Customer Calls Q1 to Drive Retention and Revenues -- Andy Bailey, President of NationLink, sent me this recent note "Our Q1 Theme was 'Back to the PAST' ...Getting back to basics with a focus on two things this entire year -- Thing 1 -- CAM Production (getting our sales team to perform at the highest level possible) and Thing 2 -- Retention (making sure that at a minimum we didn't lose what we have now -- retention of clients, team members and partnership). Q1 we managed a program that you suggested in a meeting over a year ago. We called it 'Client Contact' and we had each person call one client each week and ask your '4 questions.'" Continues Bailey...

"We created a scoreboard where we read aloud each Monday the results of those calls and checked off the board on the way to reaching out to 150 of them. Monday (April 6) was the last reporting day and our team reached the 150 goal (celebration is April 23rd where we are taking our team along with those clients we called to drinks and dinner at Urban Flats in downtown Nashville). Not just that but we have gotten so good at the calls and gotten so much great feedback and additional business that we have decided to make this Retention program a part of our culture and keep the calls going even after we close out the quarter... proof that you can create a habit (good ones or bad ones) in a short period of time. And there were people here that had no interest in calling clients -- now they actually enjoy it." Concludes Bailey...

"Q2 Theme is 132 New Friends; we spent Q1 reaching out to existing "Friends" and Retention. Now we are going to focus on New Friends (new clients) while maintaining the old ones and we will use much the same approach where we write them in each Monday and talk about the successes as a group. Here's a picture of the new scoreboard we are using. We are using EMMA an online survey system to gather weekly data for our Monday meetings -- we send this survey to the team Thursday at 2:00 and require it completed by Friday it 2:00 -- this has given us all the content that we need to review and each manager has access to the data collected to prep for the meeting. Here is a link to the survey"

Rising Medical's 10th Anniversary Celebration -- notes Jason Beans of this Chicago-based firm "We recently celebrated our 10 year anniversary. Leading up to the event, we had a contest to develop a 'Rising Mascot' from old marketing materials. I wasn't involved with the contest, and had no expectations. What the employees in WI and IL came up with blew me away and touched me more than I can express. The Talent Management team put together a video clip of the event." What's powerful is how Beans' employees really connected back to the company's core values. And if you want to see a funny moment, go to minute 3 in the video. I thought this was an excellent way to celebrate a company's birthday.

Monthly Rhythm of Learning -- like the execs at GE, it's critical to develop a monthly habit of ongoing executive education for your middle and upper managers. To bring you first class education right to your desktop or conference room, we just announced our April -- June Growth Series of LIVE Webcasts --here's the link-http://www.gazelles.com/growth-s3.html. And the webcasts are archived so you can watch on your own schedule -- and we've removed the 30 day limit! HINT: you still have to schedule a time inside your company for everyone to watch the webcasts or it just won't happen -- that's why it's good to show these during a formal monthly management meeting.

As a Bonus, if you purchase the series, you will get the 4 hour Chet Holmes webcast live from our Sales and Marketing Summit -- April 21, 9am -- 1pm EST.

Don't Blame Capitalism; Nash's MOM; Coovert's Makeover; Chet Holmes 4 Hour Live Webcast

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Chet Holmes 4-hour LIVE (and archived) Video Webcast -- over 1300 of you listened to Chet's 30 minute teleconference and given the response we're going to broadcast Chet's 4 hour presentation LIVE from the Sales & Marketing Summit, Tuesday, April 21, 8am -- Noon CST (9am -- 1pm EST) -- the same as we did with Tom Peters at the Growth Summit -- details below.

Why do you call them "Rocks" -- referring to the quarterly priorities on the One-Page Strategic Plan, it's a term borrowed from Stephen Covey. Cameron Herold, founder of BackPocketCOO, pointed me to a YouTube video where the term is explained in less than 2 minutes by the Franklin Covey organization in a nice demonstration -- go to www.gazelles.tv and scroll down the right hand column -- you'll see the video. Worth showing at your next weekly or monthly management meeting.

Alignment Starts with the Company Name -- and this note from Scott Nash a couple days ago "Yep- we all looked at ourselves quite puzzled when you said to write our (company) name on the top of the 1-page plan." Like Federal Express changed their name to FedEx; My Organic Market was known by its customers as simply MOM. So this week Scott announced that they had formally changed the name of their company to MOM's Organic Market (nice image anyway) including a change of their URL to www.momsorganicmarket.com. It's a hundred little things like this that drive brand and alignment.

Using Post-It Notes to Reinforce Core Values -- David Hauser is co-founder and CTO of GotVMail, a leading provider of virtual phone systems for entrepreneurs. In an earlier blog he shared how they use a very non-tech tool -- Post-it Notes -- to reinforce their core values -- here's a link to his short description/blog on the topic. And thanks to Les Rubenovich, their Gazelles coach, who brought this to my attention.

Absolute Tile and Stone is the latest "Makeover" company for Fortune Small Business magazine. Sander Coovert, President of this St. Louis-based firm, had seen the announcement to apply in my insights and was chosen. Here's a link to the article outlining his challenges and advice he's already received to drive revenues and reduce costs (the one-two punch we all must focus on). If you have ideas for him, please contribute -- there's a link in the article and your thoughts might be published as FSB continues to follow Sander's progress. There's also a short video about his firm (a real benefit from being chosen as a Makeover candidate).

India Leads Needed for FSB Article -- Malika Zouhali-Worrall, a reporter with FORTUNE Small Business Magazine, is looking for interesting for-profit social enterprises partly- or wholly- based in India (or with a large customer base there) to visit during an upcoming trip to India. "By 'for-profit social enterprise' I mean a company that is aiming to create a social impact and/or environmental impact as well as generate a financial profit. Given that we're a U.S.-based magazine, I'm looking for a company that has some connection to North America -- it would be ideal if one of the founders is North American or has spent a lot of time in the U.S. or Canada. If you know of anyone who does, please contact me ASAP at [email protected]

Don't blame Capitalism -- the free market system has been taking a huge hit from this latest financial fiasco. I've ALWAYS seen the financial sector as a separate entity from entrepreneurs -- they are two different beings. And contrary to what our politicians would like us to believe, it was their co-opted support that caused the mess. This CNN article makes a great case for why Capitalism is not to blame.

Details -- Chet Holmes LIVE Webcast April 21, 9am -- 1pm EST -- you and your team can watch it live or later in archived form -- a way to partially attend the Sales and Marketing Summit without leaving your office.

Price:

0. No charge for those sending three or more execs to the Summit (this way your teams can share in the learning); otherwise,
0. Not attending Summit with three - individual license $199; company license (unlimited viewers from various computers) $495.
0. No charge -- and if you've already purchased a company license to watch David Meerman Scott's LIVE webcast from the Summit (April 21, 2pm -- 4pm EST), part of our April -- June Growth Series Webcasts, you'll get the Chet Holmes webcast for no charge.

This is our continuing push to bring first class executive education right to your desktop or conference room. Here's a link to sign-up for Chet's webcast or the entire Growth Series

Congrats and Thank you -- Prabhu; Harrington; de Jong; Alawi; Amon; Robinson

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Thank You from the Depths of my Heart -- you continue to be great students of business (summits, webcasts, workshops, coaching) and are reaping the rewards. I received several heart-warming emails this week of the results you're achieving as you continue to invest in learning and execute our teachings -- results achieved globally from Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America -- enjoy these positive signs:

• Ajay Prabhu (Bangalore) reports 65% year-on-year revenue growth (ending March 31) on their way to $100m next year -- and a surprise bonus for all the employees
  
  
• Jack Harrington (Paris) moved to Paris this week to head up a new $800 million joint venture for Raytheon.
  
  
• Kees de Jong (Amsterdam) is heading the other direction, moving to the U.S. to run the $100 million firm that purchased his company
  
  
• Nada Alawi (Kingdom of Bahrain) noted that communication and productivity have improved dramatically since putting the daily huddles in place just a few weeks ago
  
  
• Randy Amon (Maryland) this week became one of 8 global functional execs of a 123,000 employee firm
  
  
• Adam Robinson (Chicago) is controlling the ink in his industry and has seen web traffic jump 300%; web leads up 600%; and a Fortune 50 client hire his firm on the spot

Their short stories are under DETAILS below -- please read to know that there is a lot of positive news, especially among those remaining great "students of business". I look forward to hearing your stories.

Thank you for continuing to participate -- almost 200 executives will be attending the Sales and Marketing Summit two weeks from today in New Orleans -- I greatly appreciate the business as we share tools to drive revenue -- you don't want to miss this once-in- our-lifetime opportunity to grab market share NOW. If you can spare 48 hours, join us and feed on the "juice" from these events -- especially if you and your executives could use a good pumping up -- being around those that are winning!

Thank you for your support -- our family's journey ends tomorrow as we head back to the U.S. after seven months travelling around the world with our four children -- it's been an eye opening experience for all of us. My wife and I will be sharing our experience at the EO University in Barcelona next fall. Special thanks to Raghoo Potinii (India), Fred Crosetto (China), Hazel Jackson and Sonu Shivdasani (Middle East); and Kees de Jong, Sebastian Ross and Leendert Bikker (Europe) -- and their teams that served as our hosts in the various countries we visited.

DETAILS:

Ajay Prabhu, COO, Bangalore-based QuEST -- "Happy to report that we have closed the last financial year (ending March 31, 2009) with 65% year-on-year revenue growth and have announced a surprise bonus for our people. Our five year goal was to cross $100M revenue in the year ending March 31, 2010. The market conditions are challenging to say the least. We are making progress with confidence. The Gazelles movement has taken hold in QuEST." Ajay noted that they meet one day a month for learning and a "workout" session; quarterly decide on Top 5 and Top 1 of 5 goals with posters pasted all over their buildings; established a mail id and web-page exclusively for Gazelles; and are popularizing a "daily question of the quarter" which Ajay asks all the time.

Jack Harrington sold his company, VTC, to Raytheon a few years ago. So impressed were they of his management disciplines they put him in charge of their fastest growing half billion dollar division. He's continued to send his team to our workshops and Summits (they'll be in New Orleans), and now Raytheon has given him an international assignment in France, outside Paris, as the CEO of a Joint Venture, 1/2 owned by Raytheon and 1/2 owned by Thales ($20B+ French defense company). Notes Harrington "it is about $800M in size, very globally focused, with 80% of business international. It will be a 3 year assignment and I'm moving the family to Paris. I want to get my new team to the Dec Rockefeller event in DC."

Kees de Jong has a similar story. He sold his Amsterdam-based firm to a larger company in the U.S., Survey Sampling International. The private equity firm that orchestrated the deal has now asked Kees to move to the U.S. to run the whole company, again, based on the management disciplines he had placed inside his own firm and helped spread to the larger company. You'll meet a couple of his team members in New Orleans as well.

Nada Alawi, General Manager of National Occupational Safety & Health Centre in the Kingdom of Bahrain, noted "Your workshop made a great impact on my business! I used to suffer from a lack of communication and ridiculous delays of all kinds in our workplace! Now I feel that most people are productive and I actually have disciplined myself to participate in our 9:30am huddle...I am very happy with the positive effect it has had on me and my company."

Randy Amon, in a similar story to Kees and Jack, sold his company to a billion dollar firm APCC several years ago, was able to survive the transition and became a Senior Leader of the larger firm. This week, he was named SVP, Global Customer Care, Quality and Process of Schneider Electric, the firm that acquired APCC over two years ago. Noted Amon in his email to me "I remain as one of the Sr. leaders in North America but my focus returns to a global leadership position. I had to once again see if I could survive in a new and much larger organization - we have 123,000 employees worldwide. I believe my continued success is in part attributed to the learning I received (via Gazelles)."

Adam Robinson, President of Illuma LLC, sent this note last Thursday "I wanted to share with you a major impact you've made to my business. I listened as you told us, 'if you're not blogging about your business or your industry, you're losing out on an amazing opportunity. Try it for 6 months, and see what happens.' So, I did.

My company is in the business of helping companies find and select talent and since August of 2008 I've been blogging at my Verne-inspired http://BetterHiringToday.com. What started off as a 'let's see if I can do this' side project has turned into a catalyst for a whole new way of looking at the world.

A few key results:

• the VP of Sales at a Fortune 50 company read my 4-part series on "How to Hire Salespeople" and sent me an email hiring us on the spot.
  
  
• Publishers have republished my articles, and paid me to license content that I was happy to post for free. Unbelievable!
  
  
• I was asked to pitch an outline for a book, based on the content I've been delivering to the blog, and have a proposal on the table to publish it.
  
  
• Web traffic to my business website is up over 300%, with inbound web leads up over 600%. Several of my posts are on Page 1 on Google for organic results (i.e. "recruiting templates", "30 60 90 Day Plans")
  
  
• Since I'm always looking for new things to write about, I'm out talking with more customers, and in more meaningful ways, about things that they care about. I then write about what we discussed, and send them a note telling them so. Loyalty has skyrocketed.
  

The results have been so good that I recently tossed the original rinky-dink free Wordpress design template and spent a few bucks to have it professionally redesigned and integrated with our mailing list. Thanks again for the incredible value delivered, and I'll see you in Chicago in May (Rockefeller Habits workshop).

Keep on learning and growing!

Five Minute Strategy Primer; Innovative CEO ebook; Get Schooled

"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

"Revenue is not a given today -- in a sense we've been in daycare since we've had it so good up to this crisis -- and now it's time to grow up -- we're all going to need to go back to school." 
                                                                                                                            
                                             Brett Sheldon, Founder
                                             Salvo Real Estate Solutions

Five Keys to Driving Revenue -- the first is to sell "loss avoidance" instead of benefits, the rest are outlined in my latest "Growth Guy" column which I've presented to over 1000 executives the past few weeks -- these keys work. Take three minutes and read or listen (I led a 20 minute teleconference on these five strategies on Tuesday -- here's the link)

Strategy Drives Revenue -- I just got off the phone with Brett Sheldon who is attending our Sales Summit in a couple weeks -- Brett's always been a great student of business. He asked me an important question -- what are the frameworks for strategy/marketing (I see strategy and marketing as one in the same) since there doesn't seem to be a single unified theory. Here's a quick primer on strategy and some key resources:

0. First framework is Jim Collins' Hedgehog -- www.jimcollins.com for description, worksheets, tutorials -- and a key is figuring out a profit/x different than everyone else in your industry -- he has a tutorial on that as well -- I'll be pushing him on this topic at the Growth Summit in October.
    
0. Second framework is Bob Bloom's Who, What, How, and Imaginative Acts outlined in his book Inside Advantage. Noted Brad Skelton in an email to me last week, who runs a $100 million plus business that has averaged 35% annual growth the past eight years "We did a session 2 nights ago with Bob Bloom. Fantastic mate! He helped us cut through the crap and get to the essence of what Skelton Sherborne is about in simple language. The clarity we have is amazing and we are embarking on changing the way we communicate with customers and attract new business."
0. Third framework is Philip Kotler's Classic 4 P's of Marketing:
    
   0. Price -- we don't think strategic enough about this topic, so read Holden and Burton's Pricing with Confidence as well as their blog or hear Burton speak at the Sales and Marketing Summit
   0. Product -- Geoffrey Moore is the thought leader -- his whole bowling pin strategy outlined in Crossing the Chasm is key along with the idea of making sure you pick a narrow enough niche and provide it with a 100% solution -- it's this last point most companies mess up and don't fulfill. Moore created an important marketing matrix for those of us at the Growth Summit in Vegas.
   0. Place -- whoever is in the most channels wins! Better to have less products and more channels than the other way around. Michael Masterson's book Changing the Channel outlines 12 different channel strategies -- I'm working to get him to next year's Sales Summit
   0. Promotion -- where the first location anyone looks is the web, a strong content-rich, educational promotional program is critical. David Meerman Scott is the first guy, in my viewpoint, that has made sense of Web 2.0 in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR. These are the most cost effective promotional tools a business can use. We're actually webcasting his 2 hour presentation from the Sales Summit April 21.
       
0. Then there are four critical articles to read (listed on My Gazelles as well):

0. Jim Collins "Building Your Company Vision"
0. Jim Collins "Turning Goals into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms"
0. Francis Frei's "Commerce Bank" case study
0. Michael Porter's "What is Strategy"

Own a Word or Two -- then Control the Ink in your Industry -- when it's all said and done, what you hope to do is own a word or two in your industry ("Growth Guy") and then get about controlling the ink around that word -- books, articles, blogs, wikis, etc. And how do you know if you're making progress? Google your word(s) and see where you rank.

Ron Alvesteffer's ebook for Service Express -- speaking of ink, Ron, YPOer and President, emailed me last Thursday to let me know "I took your advice and wrote a book" -- and it's a very innovative ebook where he's embedded video of himself in the ebook -- you have to check it out by going to his website -- it's in the right hand column. It cost him roughly $50k including the ghost writer. It's serving as an excellent sales and marketing tool as well as a recruiting tool to find top talent.

Just find the best ideas and then implement them -- this is Ron's philosophy which has helped him take the company to over $25 million, 135 employees in 14 offices. And his best producing offices are in Michigan! Notes Ron "once every two months I bring in all the managers from our offices and spend a day learning together. The key is simply finding the best ideas -- we attended last year's Sales Summit -- and then implementing them."

It seems the best keep on learning!