Most of you know that I do speaking events as a core part of my business.  In fact, I’ve done them in 18 countries over the past year at major conferences, for major companies, and for YPO & EO Forums and Chapters.

What you may not know is that many groups also hire me to speak via a webinar or Skype. Months like August & December work great for webinars, as employees don’t want to travel to hear speakers.

I have some spots on my calendar that would work well, if you want me to speak but maybe aren’t ready to pay my rate for a keynote, or if it’s last minute and you need something extra for your event.

It’s certainly always better to have me out live – but certainly very worthwhile to book me this way for your group as well.  In fact, I’m doing three webinars next week for a company in Europe.

Drop me a note here – if you’d like to discuss.

Every meeting should have a Chair, a Timekeeper and Participants.

The Chair classifies the meeting type upon invitation to the meeting, announces it at the start of the meeting, and guides the agenda. The Chair also closes discussion five minutes before the end of the meeting to ensure that people can get to their next one, and take care of any other responsibilities along the way.

The Timekeeper role is rather self-explanatory. Timekeepers make sure everyone stays on schedule and that all points in the agenda are covered. They prevent the Chair and the Participants from lingering too long on any one point.

The Participants in a meeting are not passive observers. They need to arrive to meetings prepared to contribute and stay interested throughout the meeting. Participants may also be responsible for maintenance of what I like to call ‘The Parking Lot.’ This is a repository for all ideas that may come up during the meeting, but don’t necessarily need to be handled during it. At a later date, the issues stored in the Parking Lot are addressed.

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

The role of leadership is to align, support and enable teams to do the work they were hired to do.

Leadership’s role is not to follow up or “hold people accountable.”  When the right people are hired and the right plans are in place, people can execute and leadership can support them.

Leadership ensures that people are working on projects and tasks that are aligned with the rest of the goals of the company.

They ensure that team members have the commitment or emotional support to do their part in the process.  Leadership can assess if skill development is necessary on any of the individual sub-steps, in any of the projects, well in advance because they know what everyone is working on.

In addition, leadership can ensure that the proper bandwidth and resources—money, people, time, supplies and more–are available to complete the outlined projects. They can focus on alignment and ensuring that all the projects being worked on are the right ones to drive the overall company goals.

Dr. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, authors of One Minute Manager, developed a model in the 1960s that’s still used today in the best-run companies on the planet, and it’s called “Situational Leadership.”  When companies have tightly reverse-engineered their plans, they can spend time effectively leading their people.  Situational leadership involves the leader giving the correct balance of either skill development or emotional support to help their subordinates perform at optimal levels.  Being able to slow down and give the proper amount of skill development to their team on an ongoing basis is critical.

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

Communicating feedback to employees is all about learning, but the learner controls the learning environment, and they have to want to learn how to take feedback in order to be successful.

The learner must perceive a need–if the learner already thinks they know it all, then they won’t be ready to learn from you.  Let them create their own need by failing a couple of times first.

Feedback can be either written or verbal. I use both. Usually a mix of clear concise written feedback incorporating comments about where they can improve along with areas they should continue works best.

Scoring each area on a scale also works in clarifying the feedback.  Feedback has to be accurate showing you observed them closely and made good written and mental notes.

Describe what happened but don’t make general comments when giving feedback. It is much better to say exactly what was done well, or what could be improved upon. By providing specific examples, the learner knows exactly where to focus their efforts in order to improve.

As a general rule, people enjoy getting positive feedback and don’t like hearing too much negative feedback.  Providing positive feedback shows support in their efforts and fosters more open learning.  Often when you address someone’s strengths, the flip side is a weakness that they notice on their own.  Start your feedback with positive statements. As I like to say, “two strokes for one poke,” meaning for each negative they have to work on, we give them two positives they should maintain.

Keep in mind that the message delivered isn’t always the message received.  Check to ensure that your perceptions are accurate with them also using the aforementioned methods.  Not only does it ensure you are both on the same page, but it also helps to ensure the feedback sinks in.  When the learner states they agree with your feedback, you know they’ve absorbed it. If the learner disagrees, or is confused with any of the feedback, discuss it until they are clear.

pic Show Me The Networking

Taking a client or prospect out to dinner is pretty standard business.  If you want to grow business, you need to wine and dine clients, right?  Nothing radical about that concept.

How could anyone poke holes in this centuries old business practice?  Well, a friend of mine recently challenged me on this and asked me a question that I hadn’t really considered and based upon my experience, most in business haven’t considered either.

His question was simple: Why do most companies take their clients out to expensive dinners or rounds of golf that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars and then when it comes time to send them a gift, those same executives get wigged out over a gift that costs a couple hundred dollars?

He went on to explain that the meal is consumable and gone the same day, and although there is a memory created, most clients have that same experience with dozens of vendors each year and the memory fades quickly. Why is your dining or social experience any better than the next guy? Doesn’t it make sense to instead surprise your best clients with a gift that is best in class, practical, unique and that every time they use it they think of you for decades after?

I was stunned by the simplicity of the concept and it dawned on me that he may be on to something. We as business owners have been programmed to do the same things our competition is doing and think we are making an impact or truly deepening a relationship for the long term. We take people out to a nice three hour dinner with great food and drink or spend hundreds of dollars on a five hour round of golf, only to leave the client without a tangible and physical memory point to be reminded of our relationship.

At best we leave them with some promotional trinket from China. I decided to test his line of thinking and ordered 15 of his best-selling gifts which was from his exclusive Cutco cutlery line. Many of you are likely familiar with the brand as it’s the Rolex and Tiffany of cutlery but what most don’t know is that this friend of mine, John Ruhlin, invented their corporate engraving business and has built a much of his strategic gifting company around this one product. He is also the guy that gave me the unbelievable Brooks Brothers experience that I wrote about last year. Very inspiring and worth a read as well.

John’s team had each of the two piece cutlery gift sets custom engraved into the steel blade my logo and each client’s name (gotta love personalization!) along with a handwritten note to each person. The cost was a couple hundred dollars a gift all in. They were sent in February so the client was not expecting anything and the basic premise was to thank them for “carving out room” for us to work together. The gifts were mailed off and I waited anxiously to see if I would get a response or if people would be too busy to even mention the gesture. It did not take long and the response was beyond my already high expectations!!

My clients loved not just the product (the brand of Cutco carried some nice weight) but went on and on about the handwritten note and the fact that a high end product like Cutco was custom engraved with their name on it. They felt special and their spouses also loved being included for once in an business appreciation experience. Big brownie points for me with the spouse…huge! The cool thing I realized is that unlike the dining experience that wears off in the weeks following, with a special gift like this, for the next 10-20 years my most cherished business relationships will be reminded of me a couple times a week and the fact that I took the time to say thank you in a special way. It will be with them when they host clients and friends at their home for business functions and for holidays for decades to come. While there is nothing wrong with social experiences, that cannot be said for the dinners I have had or the golf rounds I have played. Like most of the powerful concepts in business, giving a special gift like this is not rocket science but most of us are too caught up in email or the next deal to take a few minutes to think strategically about how we are going to leverage and impact our most important relationships.

For 3 years I’ve worked hard to build my name globally.  I’ve done paid speaking events at YPO & EO chapters in 18 countries, on 5 continents.  I coach CEOs in Geneva, Berlin, Mexico City, Australia, the UK, USA & Canada.  However, I realized when I was writing my 2013 Painted Picture that I’d forgotten my home market of Vancouver.

So I recalibrated.

During the next three year sprint, I’ll still work to deliver awesome speaking events globally, especially with EO & YPO.  I’ll still mentor and coach CEOs globally as well.  However, I’m now going to work hard to build my personal brand in the Vancouver market as a coach, mentor and board member for entrepreneurial companies. I’m going to hyper focus that effort even further, on companies that are Angel, VC and Private Equity funded to grow.  I’m the guy to help them grow from $1 Million to $100 Million.  And with less travel time, I can really dig into their companies even more to help them be successful faster.

Last week, I attended Mentor Tuesday and also attended the largest CVCA conference in 23 years (Canadian Venture Capital Association), with 650 attendees including about 100 from the United States, Europe, China and Brazil drawn to Canada’s economic stability and a private equity scene that is having successes not seen since before the global economic crisis.

This is the first time Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins came to Vancouver.  He was fantastic. And I sent out about 20 Tweets during his panel appearance as well.  Some other people too like Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC attended and the whole room stopped buzzing to hinge on his every word.

American VCs coming up here like what they see in Vancouver.  There is a crisis of venture capital supply available in Canada and a surplus of innovative Canadian technology companies that could use the funds.

Steve Hnatiuk, the CVCA Conference Chair said:

“(Here in Canada) we’re funding fewer and fewer SME’s with less and less money and we’re working very hard to attract more domestic and foreign capital into our industry so we can recycle that money into more high growth companies.”

“Venture capital tends to move in long-term cycles. This particular one has been a bit more long-lasting and a bit deeper than usual. But, there are increasing signs of green shoots starting to spring up – there have been some quality exits lately and new funds being launched.”

“The giant tech firms (the Microsofts, Intels and Ciscos of the world) are sitting on $500 billion – and are going to have to invest some of that money in the companies in our portfolios if they want to keep one step ahead of the competition. Just look at Microsoft and Skype as one indicator of what lies ahead.”

On the PE side, it’s much brighter for Canada:

“Canadian buyout (private equity) returns are 16.8% over 5 years, compared to 5.3% in the US and 8.3% in Europe.  So Canadian private equity returns outperform the US by a factor of more than 3x and Europe by a factor of more than 2x.   Canada outperforms both the US and Europe by a wide margin over a 10 year horizon as well.”

These are all pretty exciting numbers – and it certainly feels like a wave of activity in the PE & VC space is starting to happen in Vancouver.  We’re fast becoming the Silicon Valley of the north.

It’s a surprisingly small, focused & vibrant community here in BC too.  I’m on a plane to Kelowna right now to attend MetaBridge as a VIP.  It’s a joint Silicon Valley & BC Tech mini-brain trust of about 50 big thinkers in the space.

Sure feels good to be focused for the next three years again…  Fun to be learning again too.

(Guest Post by Mike Faith, CEO Headsets.com)

See if this chimes with your call center experience.

You’re trying to get help from someone who seems to only be concerned with barely walking you through a series of steps.  You can hear the click of their computer keyboard as they ‘process’ you.

They don’t fully understand what you’re saying and they can’t get to grips with a problem that may be slightly out of the ordinary, or not covered by the script on their computer monitor.  Meanwhile, time passes, blood pressure rises and it would require something extraordinary to convert your frustration into a desire to deal with that company ever again.

Customer service often leaves a lot to be desired.  Most CEOs find their call center to be an expense rather than an investment.  I suggest you change that.  I’ll quickly explain.

I run one of Americas highest quality, and possibly most expensive, call centers.  Back in 1996, I decided to take a risk and start investing heavily on Customer Service.  Our sales started to rise, repeat business increased, average sales value doubled and our profits increased.  During the past 15 years, I’ve learned how Customer service done properly can be one of the best value-for-money sales tools ever invented.  Your Customer Service is one of the most important touch points between your company and your future business.

Our Headsets.com Customer Service reps in San Francisco and Nashville are some of the best trained and highest paid in the US today.  And we receive a pay back on this investment.  Next time you think Customer Service, I hope that my experience helps you to change your mind-set.  Rather than think cost, think quality of care for your Customers…Think of the unbreakable link between sowing service and reaping sales…Think how judicious investment, not too little, not too much, will positively impact your business.

Fifteen years of experience of running my own in-house call center, in one of the most expensive parts of the world, tells me you’ll find a big payoff by investing right.