I once traveled to Boston with a colleague to hire for a position. After three intense days of back-to-back interviews, we ended up flying home empty-handed. We interviewed sixteen candidates, in multiple interview rounds. We combed through close to 150 resumes. Still, we walked away because we just didn’t find the right person.

There are 300 million people living in the United States and 35 million in Canada.  The right people exist for every role. You just have to keep looking. Trust your gut, too.  When your gut says, ‘no’ don’t let yourself keep trying to make it say ‘yes.’

Patience is a virtue when you’re hiring. Be willing to wait for the right person.

Most “A” players aren’t out there looking either, so you might just have to shake the tree a few more times…

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.

The four areas that SMART Goals in your business are needed for are:

1. Revenue. Determine a solid revenue goal for the next twelve months.

2. Profit. Employees need a profit goal to guide them.

3. Customer Service. I highly recommend using the Net Promoter Score here. It’s the single easiest way to measure true satisfaction.

4. Employee Satisfaction. I also recommend using the Net Promoter Score for establishing the benchmark for employee satisfaction as well – one number from one easy question.

For each of these areas, leadership needs to determine a goal for each area. To ensure that the goals they come up with are SMART, I use these guidelines to help me (mine feature a slight variation on the popular business acronym):

S – Shared – Sharing goals with a coach, mentor or team member adds a little extra pressure to hit them.  I even share them with suppliers and clients.

M – Measurable – Put a number on each goal so you can easily say if the goals were hit or missed. Make the goals clear. Hazy goals produce hazy results.

A – Attainable – Your goal has to be remotely possible for it to be included.

R – Relevant – Ensure that all goals are worth working on.

T – Time-based – Put a date on goals if they’re due before December 31^st.

Once you have the goals set and the team is committed to hitting them, the next thing you need to do is discuss boundaries. That is to say, yes, you want to hit these goals, but to what extent? Would you work 90 hours a week to hit them, or at maximum, 45?  Would you give up equity in the company to raise money to help you hire people to hit the goals? What won’t you do?

Here are some example points that are worth discussing while you create your own list of boundaries:

· Amount of debt you’ll take on

· Number of hours you’ll work

· Number of days traveling you’re willing to put up with

· Percentage of profits you will share, 0-100%

· Percentage of equity you will give up in the company, 0-100%

· Will you complete any acquisitions? If so, how many?

· Would you fire ‘C’ or ‘B’ players? When?

It’s critical to have the discussions in advance.  Boundaries are like values–you can’t compromise them to win.

Years ago, I took a course by Dan Sullivan called “Strategic Coach.”  In the course, they taught us about something they called “Unique Ability.”

My “Unique Ability” turned out to be that I use quick, intuitive ideas to help entrepreneurs reverse engineer their dreams.

In a perfect world, I would outsource, delegate, or stop doing anything except for those tasks that utilize my Unique Ability.

Here’s how Dan Sullivan defines “Unique Ability” in his Strategic Coach program:

“First, it is a superior ability that other people notice and value; second, we love doing it and want to do it as much as possible; third, it is energizing both for us and others around us; and, fourth, we keep getting better, never running out of possibilities for further improvement.”

In order to truly focus, use this simple exercise to help you start working only on items that are close to your Unique Ability:

1) Make a list of everything you do daily and weekly.  I like to pretend someone took a video of me working all day for a month and I write down everything in the movie.

2) Put all of those items in column one of a spreadsheet.

3) In column two, put one of these four letters describing your skill level related to the task:

a. I = Incompetent – meaning you’re terrible at it

b. C = Competent – meaning you’re OK at it

c. E = Excellent – meaning you’re awesome at it (but you don’t love it)

d. U = Unique Ability – follow Dan’s definition above.

4) In column three, put the hourly wage you’d be willing to pay someone to do that task as a full time job.

5) Then begin quickly delegating, stopping or outsourcing the lowest paying tasks and the tasks where I have only a C or I.

This simple system will help you quickly become more focused on doing exactly what you need to grow your company and love doing it.  Imagine if you had everyone in your company only working on areas that warranted the wage you were paying them or were at least items where you and they would rank them as E or U.

I work very hard to coach entrepreneurs on doing this every two weeks, you get the lesson for free.  Try it.

Laptop Advertising 2011

Here are the awesome new companies now advertising on my laptop for 2011…

OutsourcingThingsDone.com is a leased labor business based in Manila, Phillipines.  They provide high-level virtual assistants, customer service teams, plus much more.  With clients in the US, Canada and Australia they can work to find you a solution for your virtual labor needs.  Plus, it’s who I’ve been using for the last 6 months for my virtual assistant.

Nita Lake Lodge is Whistler’s Most Exclusive Luxury Boutique Hotel.  It’s position overlooking Nita Lake was chosen long before the boutique hotel was built in 2008. Nita Lake Lodge is a truly luxurious accommodation that provides both the private beauty that comes only with waterside property and the convenience of being steps from the base of Whistler Mountain.  Inside you can indulge every sense. Settle in to sumptuous comfort as you take in lake, mountain or valley views from your suite. Discover a new world of tastes in one of three gourmet restaurants that celebrate organic, locally sourced foods.  Or enjoy the including spa treatments.  I know it well – my chalet is a one minute drive away.

Appletree Answers is committed to providing an integrated communications center for inbound and outbound calls, emails, faxes and chats. Delivered through a state-of-the-art infrastructure, the company’s service gives business owners and employees a 24/7 messaging center. With dedicated teams and 21 offices around the United States and Puerto Rico, Appletree delivers a powerful customer service experience that positively reflects on every one of their customers. Based in Wilmington, Delaware, Appletree Answers is a consistent winner of business awards and recognition including four years in a row on the INC 500.

I Love Rewards is an employee recognition solution that helps companies recognize brilliant performance and empowers employees to choose their own rewards.  Unlike traditional service award programs, I Love Rewards creates authentic moments of recognition that resonate with workers of every generation.  I know this company in depth.  I mentored them back in 2007/08.  They’re really well run.  Consistently rated a top company to work for nationally.

Ruhlin Promotion Group is someone you should engage in 2011.  There are millions of companies that offer value added products & services, but executives are too busy to hear how great your product is…unless you shock them at their core. Ruhlin Promotion Group employs “strategic appreciation” and it involves giving gifts that are so cool and different that your potential clients and current clients have no other choice but to respond. Custom engraved Cutco, eclectic Robert Graham shirts, plasma sized woodcarvings…nothing is too high end or off limits. Bottom line they can help you open doors & thanks clients with gifts that rock and inspire people to pay attention.  I already have a FULL set of their chefs knives engraved with my name & company logo on them too.  His new sticker is en route…and will replace Kiva.org

Background Backup delivers a very personal level of service to business owners & entrepreneurs looking to ensure that critical business data is securely protected and accessible. Tailored for organizations sized 1 to 100, data is automatically encrypted and backed up as often as every 15 minutes, to local drives as well as secure cloud locations.  No-one really cares about backing up, but EVERYONE cares about being able to restore – wherever you are, and whenever you need it.  I used them all of 2010.  Love them.

Why would you try being an entrepreneur or CEO of a growing company without having a coach to help you navigate.

Every top athlete on the planet has one.  Their coaches pushes them to higher and higher heights.

All the top CEOs work with a coach.  Their coaches help them see what’s really happening.  They help drive them, they help guide them to work on the highest impact areas and not keep getting distracted by the busyness of the day-to-day.

Having a coach guide you with a couple of calls or meetings every month can easily be one of the highest impact things you can do to grow your business this year.

Getting an outside perspective from a coach, will allow you to learn from their expertise and experiences as you discuss the key areas you are working on each week.

Some weeks you may learn nothing new.  And on other calls, one single insight can save or make you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Often your coach will be someone you could never afford to have working for you day-to-day, but their coaching programs can be very affordable.  A friend of mine said “”If the Coach can’t add value beyond the fee, then you’ve got the wrong Coach. If the Coach delivers, it’s better than free! Easy call here.”

Why not try one for 6-12 months.  Why not invest in growing yourself & your business instead of trying to figure it out all by yourself.

This is an open invitation to “Crazy-Busy” CEOs, entrepreneurs and business owners who know they could be working less and making more if only they had the right guidance from someone who’s already been there and done it!

Ya, I coach entrepreneurs & CEOs, and if you’re reading this, perhaps you’d like me as your coach this year too.  If you have the right stuff – I’d love to help you make your dreams happen too.  Drop me a note.

Do you think cute girls randomly driving Red Bull Minis all over a city have anything to do with Red Bull having over 60% of the energy drink market?? That is ONE of many of Red Bull's marketing tactics.

You only truly see one out of three ads put in front of you. And you only take action after seeing a brand marketed to you one out of nine times.  So, it takes something like 27 hits from a brand for a prospect to even respond. Think about that for a second. Are your prospective customers getting all 27 hits?

Twenty years ago, I was recruiting franchisees at Queens University for College Pro Painters, and we decided to hammer the students on campus with 27 hits in 48 hours to really drive as much awareness and potential candidates in the door as possible.

So, five of us College Pro people hit campus like a tidal wave, parking our College Pro van on campus.  We placed 100 lawn signs around campus, handed out flyers at meal lines on campus, put the same flyers under doors in dorms. Sometimes we were asked to leave, which to us meant, “leave this floor and go to the next one.” While we did this, all of us walked around campus wearing huge College Pro logos on our winter coats.  We went into classrooms and put flyers on desks and chairs and ran tables in the main buildings where we’d hand out flyers to students.  We even called each student who lived on campus who had a home address in cities we needed franchisees.

At the end of two days, there wasn’t anyone we cared about who didn’t know we wanted franchisees.  We easily hit our marketing goals with these guerilla marketing efforts. What did our competitors do? They ran an ad in the paper.

The reason why College Pro was successful—whether it was recruiting for franchisees or marketing our services to customers—was because we were focused on our target market at all times. The reason our competitors failed was because they put an ad in the paper for new employees! Sure, there’s a chance they knew their prospective leads might come from the local paper, but it was a shot in the dark. Placing an ad in the paper meant fighting to get your message out there to every single type of reader and hoping the right set of eyes landed on your specific entry.

Why market to a wide group of people, with maybe only twenty percent who might be listening, when you can market to an audience that is completely tuned in to what you have to say?

In EVERY economy, including this one, some companies kick the ass of their competitors.  If you want to be the one kicking it, start pushing 27 hits.  If you used to do it and stopped.  Perhaps that’s why your revenues have dropped as well.

I had a call with an entrepreneur today – he said he was going to read 12 business books this year – this was my suggestion after thinking about it…

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12 biz books seems like over kill…

a) reading that many keeps our brains racing when we need them to relax a bit

b) many are repeats of stuff we already are not doing…

I would do this…

a) Read 3 biz – and pick them carefully.  Really read them.  Write notes on them.  And share summaries with your employees (and me)

b) Read these books for fun…
–Endurance – by Albert Lansing – it’s about Ernest Shackleton – awesome story – my fav book of all time – read it 15 years ago.

–Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – consistently rates as one of the best books ever written – it’s exactly what the USA is going through today – and the Entrepreneur/Capitalist is the hero (finally)

–A Prayer For Owen Meany – by John Irving – just an awesome book – brain candy

–The Agony & The Ecstasy by Irving Stone – about Michelangelo – we’re a long way from being Renaissance Men – awesome story

Then read a book on Wine and another on something random…

Just my thoughts…

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What are you reading ?

Some companies I have coached on creating a Painted Picture have done an amazing job.

Red Balloon Days in Sydney, Australia, did a great job with their Painted Picture.  They made it jump off the page by having a designer use creative typography–cool fonts, animation, colors and varied type sizes–to keep the reader engaged and excited.  Email me if you’d like to read it.

Nurse Next Door in Vancouver, Canada, did a brilliant job constructing their Painted Picture. They brought it to life by creating a simple PowerPoint slide show complete with audio where co-founder Ken Sim reads out the Painted Picture while it’s being highlighted with photos and graphics. The visuals are an excellent feature, and get the reader engaged while anchoring ideas. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Tina Turner song they used (Kidding! Sort of) – but loved when they shared their Painted Picture on YouTube.

Sebastian Tondeur, the CEO of MCI based in Geneva, filmed a fantastic introduction to his company’s Painted Picture.  He stood in front of a green screen, and then had company graphics inserted.  He explained what the Painted Picture was and why he’d written it.  Sebastian’s company was operating in twenty-five countries when I helped him write the Painted Picture. Afterwards, he brought me to a company meeting to meet with the leaders of each country’s division so I could explain the idea behind the concept of a Painted Picture to them.  It was a great way to introduce the idea and instantly start to trickle it down to all eight hundred employees.

All of the Painted Picture Hall of Famers did exactly what you’re supposed to do with the exercise: they pushed beyond the drab corporate-speak and confining metrics, and answered the simple question, “What’s really possible for our company?”

See your Painted Picture as the ultimate opportunity to make your company shine.

For more information on this topic, check out: Building a World Class Culture.