The Happy Future Group

The shift from negativity to positivity

May 11, 2009

Unfortunately, negativity takes quite a toll on too many people.
It brings an array of feelings and emotions that are eventually destructive. Yet, there are simple ways of dealing with negativity and move towards a much more positive approach of life.

Negativity is used with different meanings. In many cases, someone will be labeled as negative, just for being critical, which annoys the person who is challenged. This is why calling the “challenger” negative is an easy way to dodge what may be a difficult discussion.
This is not what I mean by negativity in this article.
What I mean is the attitude that reduces anything and everything to an almost impossibility to do and achieve anything, a systematic refusal to even consider undertaking. It is the preference of the unsatisfying status quo above the potentially riskier change. It is loaded with negative experiences, such fear of failure and of rejection.
Negativity does not bring anything good in life. It leads to inaction, frustration, even sickness and depression.

Nonetheless, negativity is not a final condition and it can be turned around without to much difficulty. This, however, does not mean without effort…
The first step is to recognize that you have landed into negativity, and to have the desire to change this. Very often, this where most of us can feel “stuck”. How to make the switch to positivity?
A very important aspect of turning things around is to not isolate yourself, which is common when you do not feel too happy about yourself. Let the people that you trust that you are willing to change for the best will bring you more support than you would think, and for a simple reason: people who like you suffer of your negative mindset, too, and they will be more than willing to help you become more positive. So, do not hesitate to let your closest friends and relatives know what you are doing and have them get involved.

A really good way to deal with negativity is to increase your level of self-awareness. Every time you realize that you have a negative thought or reaction, just say “stop!” and rephrase your thought in positive language. For instance, instead of saying “that won’t work” ask yourself “how could I make this work?”.
Also, have your friends participate in this and allow, even mandate them to be the ones saying “stop” and ask you what you think you should have said instead. This method can actually quickly become a very playful experience and stimulate you to do more of it. After a while, you will already realize how much better you feel and how more optimistic you have become. This exercise is like gymnastics of the mind and brings good results.
What also works very well is to focus on the successes and not spend too much time on failures. By celebrating the victories, you will create a dynamics of enthusiasm and success, which very quickly will by far outweigh the attempts that went wrong. This will grow your appetite for more victories, as well as your refusal to accept defeat and fight harder next time to achieve your next success. There again, support and help from trusted friends and family makes this process faster and more effective.

Life is a constant challenger of your will, of your aptitude to dare and of your knowledge and abilities. This is how we grow, feel better, and achieve fulfillment. Take on the challenge and make your life fun and exciting!

Comments Off on The shift from negativity to positivity | Personal Fulfillment | Tagged: Fulfillment, Happiness, Negativity, Positivity, Success | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Success and happiness: which came first?

May 11, 2009

I have heard and read about this question quite a few times, without getting a very clear answer, though.
Probably, this is because the question as such does not really address the core of the issue it wants to raise.
In my view, both success and happiness originate from the same, and grow in a very similar way.
In order to be successful and happy, you must start with shaping your life around your core values, and not around those that your environment imposes on you. Only by doing so, you will be able to choose and develop activities that, both professionally and personally, can bring the fulfillment and the enthusiasm that are required in any successful endeavor.

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Success can be a rather difficult concept to formalize, as its definition depends greatly on what you consider important for you in life. For some, this will be making lots of money, for others it will mean have a family, it also could be gaining a position of power or reach a certain social status; it could be becoming famous, and so on.
If you try to eliminate the subjectivity that goes together with the variety of values, a good definition of success that I have heard is that “success is to bring what you start to its completion”. I personally like this definition, because it describes very well the whole process that is necessary to reach the required satisfaction to feel successful.
What, to me, reinforces my conviction that success and happiness go in parallel is that you can write the same paragraph above, just by replacing success by happiness and the text will make just as much sense.
It is quite difficult to try to see a relation of cause and effect between the two concepts. Indeed, if you are not happy, can you feel successful? In the same line of thought, can you feel happy if you are not successful? You probably cannot.
Next to engaging in activities that match your values and working on bringing them to completion, a very important aspect for both success and happiness is to get others involved as well. Never hesitate to ask for help, for support and for feedback. You will never have enough of those. Other people’s input is very valuable to stay motivated and determined, as well as to avoid losing track.
A great way of increasing your level of happiness and success in life is to first envision what the ideal world would be. What would you do if you were the one who could make things “perfect” for yourself? Once you have defined this ideal world, you can start developing your own plan. Although in some cases, a drastic change could work, I would recommend having a step-by-step approach, as a drastic change all of a sudden could bring a lot of uncertainty and chances of failure that not everyone can handle. Set your targets to go from point A (where you are today) to point B (your ideal world). Define each step clearly and set realistic and rigorous timelines to this plan. Timelines are quite important because they will force you to keep taking action. Not doing so will always end up in inaction, because we are all very good and finding excuses to postpone what we prefer not to do. Another important part in the execution of this plan is to designate someone (friend, coach, family member, etc…) to remind you, to enforce these timelines and if needed to reprimand you, because there again, if you can get away with procrastination, chances are that you will indeed.
To sum up, the way to happiness and success requires the following: build your life around your values and choose the environment in which they can flourish. Have a plan to improve your level of fulfillment. Share the enthusiasm with others. Celebrate every success along the way. Do not forget to ask for assistance to make sure that you will not divert and give up on your plan.
This last point is actually quite important: many people feel unhappy because they have given up on their dreams.

Comments Off on Success and happiness: which came first? | Happy at Work, Personal Fulfillment | Tagged: Fulfillment, Happiness, Success | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Everyone has potential, just allow them to show you!

May 11, 2009

j0414117[1] To illustrate this, I cannot think of a better example than one of my employees when I was in the aquaculture business.
She used to work for the accounting department of a different division, and her performance was not great. At that time, I needed someone to help us out with administrative tasks and with the processing of information.
I was offered to hire her, although all the negative feedback I had heard was not encouraging. Fortunately for her, the manager under which she was working, was not exactly an example of trustworthiness or integrity, and I decided to meet her and see for myself who she really was.
I remember meeting her on a ferry to one of the islands off the coast of Vancouver Island. She was sitting in her car and did not expect much good from me, as I am known as quite straight forward and decisive.
Anyway, we had our meeting, which went rather well, and I decided to have her meet further with the rest of my team to discuss the operational needs a bit more in details. As there still was some hesitation about her real abilities, I decided to give her a chance, under the condition that we would review her performance after 3 months and then decide. If the performance was satisfactory, she would stay; if not she would go.
And what a transformation! From an unmotivated and dull person, she turned into a dynamic and resourceful collaborator. She did an amazing work, had a great productivity and came with many great ideas on how to process and present the information we gathered.
Later, the person to whom she was reporting (who reported to me) surprised us with a change of attitude for the worst, and unfortunately, I could not have her to tell me what the reasons of that change were. After several attempts to get her getting back to her former self, it appeared that this would not work, and I fired her, which left a hole in a rather sensitive position. I went to the other lady, and asked her if she felt she could take over from her supervisor. She was a little hesitant about a fairly big step forward, but as I guaranteed her that I would fill in temporarily for the areas that she did not master, yet, she agreed to take the plunge.
It was a position with much more responsibility and that needed decisiveness and authority, as she basically had the mandate to stop the plant if production was not in order. And once again, what a beautiful transformation it was!
She not only adapted to a higher position, but delivered a quality of work that I rarely had seen elsewhere, and I had been in quite a few many places!
She became the best QA Manager in the seafood business that I have met in British Columbia, and she has survived 2 mergers where I am sure she was in competition with people who had a much more solid academic background. She now is in charge of Food Safety for the largest salmon farming company in BC (and in the world)
All that was needed, was for her to have the chance to be able what she really was made of, and that would have never showed up on her resume. It was selection on the job, in the real world!

Comments Off on Everyone has potential, just allow them to show you! | Happy at Work, Leadership, My True Stories, Team and Performance | Tagged: Growth, Happiness, Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Performance, Resume | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Death of the resume

May 11, 2009

Does a resume still have any use nowadays?
I am asking the question because more and more screening of candidates is now done through a computer system.
Further, more and more resumes are written by “professional” writers, so one can wonder how much of the candidate they can truly find on the piece of paper.
For having recruited quite a few people myself, I must admit that reading all the resumes can be quite a lot of work, but on the other hand, I always found much more information in what was not written and in the overall layout and style of the resume than in the factual data.
I have not hired many people based on their past history, but much more on their personality, because once at work, that is much more important.
Moreover and very understandably, the name of the game has become to get the interview. This actually supports the point I just made above. So, what you see more and more is tactical writing to make sure that the keywords that the computer screens upon are included. The next step, which is made in many cases is to simply lie and give false information.
Of course, I am not saying that resumes are useless, but I believe that they are overrated.

Um, if you look at it as a first date, which could lead to a long-term commitment, what would you think of someone telling you only what they think you want to hear and/or telling you lies, instead of showing their true self? You probably would not want to have to do anything with that person. Oddly, this seems to be a normal state of affairs when recruiting. Interesting, isn’t it?

There are simple ways of assessing a person even without having a resume at all, but unfortunately, this is not used much. Maybe because they are a bit unconventional and less mechanical. Yet, progress and improvement only come from innovation!

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Too old to change. Or was he really?

May 11, 2009

As the Sales Director of the poultry plant, I also was managing our sales office in Germany.
The problem with that unit was that it had not generated any new significant customer for years, and as we were growing aggressively, we needed to grow in Germany as well as we were in our other markets.
Many discussions and meetings further, I came to the conclusion that the German sales office was simply useless and that we should sell to the German customers directly from our plants in The Netherlands and in Belgium.
Of course, this was a very bumpy situation. My superiors trusted my judgment, but were quite afraid of losing business in Germany (our largest market), which the General Manager of the sales office was of course not missing to tell them over and over. After all his job was on the line…
Anyway, the decision to shut the sales office was made and we had to figure out the next step.
Most customers were very old relationships, and this was important to take that into account when deciding who to appoint as the sales person for Germany. From the whole office in Germany, we decided that we should keep only one person for sales, the nine other employees would go.
There were two inside sales persons, and two sales reps. Quickly, the two inside sales persons did not make the cut and were eliminated. The 2 sales reps were very different. One was a young fellow, quite aggressive, well-connected and able to move large volumes, although quite a bit of a loose cannon, and with the tendency to yield to the customers when it came to price. Lots of volume but not much margin.
The other sales rep was in his early 50’s, a very good relationship manager, but with no track record of developing new accounts for a long time. General opinion was that he would get good prices but low volumes. General thinking was also that he was to old to change and adapt to the new strategy, and would be useless to the organization.
Yet, I chose the latter sales person, even though I shared the same worries as everyone else, but I knew one thing: he would listen and do as told, and he would bring a sense of continuity and trust to the existing customers.
We decided to keep him, and I would spend quite some time in Germany with him, visit all existing customers and accompany him in some new prospecting activities.
I presented him the sales plan, the objectives and the timelines and there we went. He simply became the best salesman we had. From a very apathetic and almost unproductive salesman, he turned into a dynamic, entrepreneurial and enthusiastic representative that brought new business, and lots of it. In the first year, our sales grew in Germany by 24%, while the industry average was only 2%. His performance was stimulating the other sales people, including me, to perform better in their respective markets.
He was not too old. He just had lost passion, because he had no clear idea of what was expected from him. In the new structure, this changed, and then he could do what he was good at: selling! And he did a great job, because by then he had become happy at work!

Comments Off on Too old to change. Or was he really? | Happy at Work, My True Stories | Tagged: Fulfillment, Happiness, Human Resources, Management, Performance, Success | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Networking? Yes! but…

May 11, 2009

It is everywhere and on everyone’s lips: networking. The panacea for success!
Last week, I could read an article on CNBC hinting toward a different look at networking. According to the writer of the article, networking and spraying business cards all over the place might have you appear a loser, eventually.
Like everyone else, I have networked and I still do, but I have also changed my views on the topic. I do not believe that networking as such is a bad thing, but just like any other “strategic” activity, it needs to be carried out with a clear plan.
There are lots of networking venues and formats, being in the physical world or being online. Therefore, you are not short of possibilities.
The main problem I see is that the cheapest and the most open to the largest number, the lower the efficiency of your networking. This, in my view, happens for a simple reason: all the people looking for help join these venues.
For instance, I am on LinkedIn. Great system as such. However, I got invites out of the blue from people whom I do not know, who do not introduce themselves, who do not seem to have the slightest interest in knowing who I am and what I do. All I receive is a spam email asking me to join their network or some unknown group, in which most of the time nothing ever happens. Surely, I will be able to show off, claiming that I have 10,000 contacts, out of which probably 9,997 will be absolutely of no help. Of course, this is not appealing for me, and most of such requests end up in the archive file!
Therefore, with such mass networking, you end up meeting mostly people who cannot help you, as they are already so busy keeping their heads out of the water. But, of course, maybe over a few years from now, and if they remember you out of the thousands of other unknown contacts that they have met, it will benefit you.
Although research shows that we all are connected within 6 degrees of separation, the best and most reliable contacts we have are our first degree ones. They are the ones that can recommend us or introduce us to the second degree. Generally, second degree contacts will be willing to get to know you, as they will trust what our common contact tells them. In my opinion, this is the best way to start developing a network. Go one degree at a time!
Another efficient way to get to know the “right” people is to network within your profession and/or your hobbies circles. People who share similar interests will be more open to expand their contact list.
If you are in a hurry to get help, get the help where it really is: with people and organizations that actually help others, not with the ones who just organize venues where you are left at your own devices with the wrong crowd.
If you are looking for a job, get in touch with people who actually are involved in job seeking (and finding for this matter)!
If you want yourself and your talent to be noticed, you need to do more than distributing business cards and sending dull invites. You must make some impact. Do something that people will notice and, most of all, will remember. This way, you will have demonstrated what you can offer to others and to organizations.
Your networking will be more successful by helping others, than by hoping that others will help you.

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

The hopeless rude guy from Planning

May 11, 2009

When I became Sales Director of the poultry processing plant, I also supervised the Inside Sales/Planning/Logistics Department.
One of the employee of that department was causing quite a few conflicts with the Production Department, mostly because of very poor communication skills. Requests sounded more like barking and politeness was a scarce commodity from his side.
That problem probably should have been addressed a long time ago, but OK, I had to deal with it now.
All I got was criticism about his conduct and “fire him!” kind of advice. Yet, he had many years of experience and had quite a lot of knowledge. That bothered me to just take the short cut and let him go.
So, I had a meeting first with him alone and later with his supervisor. In the first meeting, I addressed the problems and made him clear that I wanted to understand what caused him to act the way he did. With his supervisor, we reviewed his job description and analyzed what he liked and what he did not like about his tasks.
And bingo! We discovered that he felt very uncomfortable dealing with foreign customers having to speak in languages he did not master. The stress of the phone ringing and hear someone speaking German or English was just too much for him and he reacted his stress on his colleagues.
We decided to remove the customer contact from him, allocate that to another employee who actually enjoyed the sales side more than the production side, and dedicate our difficult friend more to the technical and planning side of production. Within days, I was receiving positive feedback from production people who were wondering what I had done to him, because now he was such a pleasure to work with.
And for him, as he was in his late 40’s, we also avoided a painful layoff that might have had severe personal consequences.
He was now doing what he liked and what he was best at. And he became very happy at work!

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

My experience with experience… and talent

April 5, 2009

Experience is one of these words in business that need very specific description to be understood. Just like quality, everyone wants it, everyone offers it, but what does it really mean?
Experience is very valuable, and nobody would argue about that. One of the most common misunderstandings about experience is to confuse it “number of years of experience”. Although one might legitimately think that the quality of experience is proportional to the number of years, this still needs to be proven. For having met people claiming more than 20 years of experience in their field, what they were actually showing was 20 times of only one year of experience, as they had been doing the same over and over again in the same position in the same company in a very routinely manner. Actually they were little adaptable and often acted as resistance agents to the change needed to improve the company performance.
Other people show an impressive list of many different experiences in very diverse fields, and yet this would not prove that they master any of these fields, either.
Too often, when recruiting, we tend to focus more on the quantitative side of experience than on the qualitative side (yes here is the “quality” word). A common misconception is to think that experience and talent are some of the same. They are not.
When recruiting people for my teams, I always have looked at their personality, and mostly their area of talent. This is what I have always looked for in a resume, and not so much for diplomas or the succession of jobs. This has always worked quite well, as each and every one of these teams has delivered superior performance.
The funny thing about the recruiting process is that job postings almost never list personality traits or talents. Instead, they focus essentially on education and experience (which in this case is actually job history).
Experience is valuable to an employer only if the potential employee knows how to share it and transfer it to his new colleagues and to his new employer, and this why personality is at least as valuable as experience.
Another misconception about experience is that people who have been in the business longer have more experience. As my personal experience has showed me, this is as untrue as youth being a guarantee for energy and dynamism. In fact, this is where the talent factor plays a paramount role: talented people, besides being more talented than their peers, also have the ability to learn much faster in their area of talent, and thus can catch up very quickly on any apparent shortage of experience.

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

The best time for prospecting

April 5, 2009

In most cases, companies do their prospecting at the worst time, which is when they have surpluses to sell.
This statement might sound a bit surprising at first, but as I am going to explain, this will make quite some sense.
As long as sales are in balance with production, most companies will try to find commercial arrangements with existing customers to deal with minor volume fluctuations. After all, when you deal with a regular business contact who knows your company and products, it is easier to set up some promotion deals and move extra volumes.
In the same idea, as long as companies can move their own production without much trouble, they do not see the point of actively going out there prospecting for new customers, as they have nothing to offer. Or so they think.
When surpluses reach levels that are not manageable anymore with the regular customer base, then they initiate a massive prospecting campaign to be able to move the extra volume.
All of this will sound like plain logic to most business owners, so why is actually the best time for prospecting the time when you are sold out?
The answer is simply because it puts you in the driver’s seat, which is not the case when you need to get rid of your products.
In many industries, surpluses for sale rarely happen to an isolated company, but very often the whole sector is suffering. The reason can be because the recent times had been quite good and everybody thought that they should increase their volumes to meet demand, but when a whole sector takes this kind of action at the same time, you can be sure that this volume increase is also going to come onto the market at the same time. The result is a saturated market, in which all participants need to move the extra volumes, sometimes at any price (and also at any cost). So prospecting in such conditions gives all the power to the buyers, who have nothing else than being patient as the sales people will come over and over again trying to out-price each other so that they can move their production. This results only in margin erosion.
In the same way, when you are short of product, in many cases there is a fair chance that your competitors have to deal with the same, and are not able to satisfy demand from their own customers
Why prospect when you have nothing to sell?
There are two main reasons for this. First, because this way, there is a lot less pressure to reach a deal, which helps you being much stronger in the commercial negotiation. Secondly, because this could be the time that you mean the most to a customer by helping out, as you could fill a gap left by one of your competitors.
Of course, you might ask how to help out and sell something you do not have. Massaging your sales and production planning can be a way to do this, or playing broker for once can do the same, and helping out makes your company look quite good, which will be useful when you are the one who needs to be helped out.
Prospecting, not out of necessity, but as a strategy to grow your business at the expense of your competitors is the way to go, and is also the most cost-efficient way. After all, remember that, on average, prospecting to get a new customer costs between 10 and 20 times as much as growing with an existing one. So, it better be well-targeted, margin oriented and fitting in a sound business strategy!

Comments Off on The best time for prospecting | Business Management, Competitors | Tagged: Growth, Management, Performance, Sales | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Always be market-driven!

April 5, 2009

This is always the right approach, even when the market is good. The alternative, being production-driven will only bring you gloom eventually.
A very recent example to illustrate this is the construction industry in the USA. The reason why they are in trouble is because they forgot to be market-driven. As their market was good, and easy, they became overconfident and instead of being business people, they actually became speculators. They assumed that the market was to never change, that the only way would be up, and they built more and more houses without having any contract at all, as they thought that there always would be buyers.
By ignoring how markets function, they created their own demise. First, markets always fluctuate; they never go up in a straight line, so they had to prepare for a downturn. Secondly, they ignored the simple law of offer and demand. By taking demand for granted, they did not anticipate the possibility of ending up with more offering than the market would absorb. And thirdly, they did not produce according to what they could sell, but they produced an inventory; that is the production-oriented error.
Of course, one could argue that the situation they face is the result of the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. This is untrue. The sub-prime issue just accelerated the problems for the construction industry. If they had built only on the basis of solid contracts, all their houses would have been, per definition, sold.
Of course, the number of mortgage defaults and foreclosures is pushing prices of houses down, but this is by far not the only reason why houses in the US are losing so much value. The inventories of unsold newly built houses are huge and the market will have to absorb the surplus.
By not being market-driven, the builders have brought themselves in a working capital crunch. Their accounts payable are going up (yes they have to pay their bills) and their accounts receivable are not coming in fast enough because of the inventories. So, in order to pay the bills and not get into bankruptcy, they have to move the inventories. Profit becomes second to cash. This is why they are selling much cheaper than they had speculated. If only they had been market-driven…
The US builder story is just a superb illustration of the advantage of being market-driven, but this is actually a very common story. Especially when a market is good, companies tend to think that this is the normal state of affairs. Add to this a normal dose of greed and then you have the perfect recipe for a disaster to happen.
Know your market and do not let yourself drag into overconfidence!

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Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Do you feel lucky, CEO?

April 5, 2009

Just a little bit of paraphrasing Dirty Harry to bring up an unusual topic of business management: Luck.

This is an almost taboo to discuss in business circles where everyone prefers to talk about plans of all sorts, about talents and skills, and about management, like luck would not exist. Well that is except for bad luck, which is still valuable as an excuse.

Unlike you might think by reading the first lines of this article, I am not a proponent of luck in business management. Actually, I am quite the type that will consider all sorts of scenarios and contingencies beforehand, but I also have to admit that luck, good or bad, does exist. So instead of arguing if luck is real or not, I have chosen to find ways of having some handle on it.

Luck exists

I would define luck by the occurrence of something that was not expected (or in many cases not anymore) to happen and which has positive impact on the performance of the business.

Every manager has experienced it. Sometimes the business environment is tough, you have tried everything you could to get the results you need and for a long time, nothing seems to work, most of the time as a result of adverse external reasons. You are not alone to experience it, your competitors struggle with the same challenges, and then when you are starting to wonder how to turn around the situation, it happens! You get what you wanted and business looks bright again. It has happened to all of us and yes then we all think the same: we have been lucky!

Luck is not a management tool

Although we all experience luck once in a while, this is not something that a manager can count on, just because of the unexpected character of luck.

Luck is not something that you can factor in, and yet it still is a factor in too many businesses. This is especially true in businesses that have been very successful or that have thrived in a very positive environment.

Just to give some examples, I would mention some hedge funds companies that instead of hedging were more interested in speculating. As long as the environment was positive, the speculation worked superbly, making some traders make personal fortunes and looking like finance wizards, until that day when things were just not as usual and the hedge fund goes bust. Actually, such traders were always doing the same, it mostly the environment that changed and they did not anticipate.

Another recent example I see of a business running too much on luck is the mortgage industry: just by making the assumption that a home is an investment that can only grow in value, some terrible mistakes have been made. Everything was going quite well until that day, when the interest rates had increased again and the mortgages had to be reset, getting home owners in trouble and also the lenders with all the ramifications that we still currently see.

A business runs on luck when people do not analyze what the company is doing so well. It is very human to be less concerned about when a business is doing well than when it struggles. At the first sign of a bad result, you see management starting to ask lots of questions to know why the results are under forecast. When the business does well, then management tends to think that they really had it all figured out and tend to minimize the impact of external factor in the good performance. They are lucky, they take it for granted and become complacent, thus setting the stage for future bad luck!

Attracting luck

Running on luck and being complacent is just bad management. But what good managers can do and will do is to create conditions to attract luck. This can be done very easily.

The best way to attract luck is to assume that you will not be lucky and that you as a manager must make it happen. Assume that nothing will go as you wish, plan a worst case scenario!

Too often, I have seen companies heading to a disaster, just because they took action too late. They reacted instead of anticipating.

Anticipation is indeed the key, and it starts with a critical attitude towards planning and forecasting. A simple rule of thumb is to consider that you will achieve only half of what you aim at, that it will cost twice as much and that it will twice as long to achieve. Once you have your operations and departments working on that worse case scenario, you are creating more opportunities because you are planning to achieve a lot more than what is in the actual business plan. Of course, it costs more energy and time, but in the end you create more conditions for “luck”.

And should be really lucky and achieve more than you can handle, like generating more sales than you can fill in, just realize that you only have a luxury problem. It might not easy to solve but it is luxury!

The conclusion of this story can be sum up by the saying “Fortune favors the audacious”.

Comments Off on Do you feel lucky, CEO? | Business Management | Tagged: Business plan, Management, Performance | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

The little divide between buyers and sales people

April 5, 2009

Last year, I posted 2 questions on the LinkedIn Q&A just to see if sales people and buyers were sharing the same views on the deal process. I was asking sales people what in their view explained not closing a deal, and I asked buyers what mistakes they found sales people were making that turned them off from buying from them.

Although the survey has no pretention of being scientific, some very clear conclusions seem to come out.

What turns buyers off the most are:

Arrogant, pushy or condescending attitude.
Telling lies or pretending to know more than they actually do.
Talking and telling their story instead of listening to what the buyer wants.
Trashing the competition.
Sales person not identifying their needs.
Poor follow-up from the sales person.
Sales people looking for excuses or blaming others or something for poor performance.

What the sales people see as a reason for a failed sales negotiation are:

Not having established the customer’s needs.
They were not talking to the right person.
Their product does not add value to the customer.
Poor pre-qualifying of potential customers.
Not having established a good enough relationship.

So, clearly the buyers are looking to be treated like mature responsible professionals. They want to hear how the product or service that the sales person offers adds value to them and meets their needs. They are not interested in hearing lies or negative story about other suppliers.
They want the sales person to identify what they are looking for and then hear why the supplier product is the best for them. That is all.

Although sales people acknowledge some of the previous issues, they see the weakness mostly in the preparation and in the person on the other side. None of them mentioned that their demeanor was part of the problem. Addressing the preparation is a good thing, and yet the area where they can score the most is pretty easy: it is about asking questions to the buyer and listening to the answers. It is so much easier to offer the right solution once you know which problems need to be solved.

For sales people it is not about showing all you know, it is about thinking along with the customer. I guess that kills the idea that to be a good sales person you must be a smooth talker. No, to be a good sales person, you need to want to help others. And if your product is useless, then pass the message onto your boss and adjust your offerings.

Comments Off on The little divide between buyers and sales people | Business Management, Competitors | Tagged: Purchasing, Sales | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

The fun about delegating

April 5, 2009

In this article, I wish to address one of the most effective management technique, which is also one of the most poorly used: delegation.

First, just a few facts
Delegation is in the very essence of management, since a whole team of people have to do the job. This group has been hired for a very simple reason: one person cannot do the job.
In order to make the teamwork towards the goal and work as one entity, management jobs have been created. Their role is not to do the job but to get the job done. And all the trouble lies in this subtle nuance.

What does make delegation work?
You have hired people to do a job, and that is for this very purpose that you have to supervise them.
You have hired them because there are competent; so do not worry of having them do what you have hired them to do. If you doubt their competence, why did you hire them?
You have lots to supervise and to attend to, so define clearly who does what and who is accountable for as well as by when the job goals must be met. Delegating will save you precious time.
Be very specific about what you expect form your staff.
Give feedback and ask for feedback, when you communicate, be brief and to the point. Your staff expects you to do that. And remember that communicating effectively is not the same as talking/socializing too much.
Be present and walk in on a regular basis. Better many short contacts during which you will immediately hear the most important information than long periods of no contact interrupted by long formal meetings.
When you do this properly, as a manager you will feel fulfilled, you will be happy to go to work, as very likely your team will perform quite well. On the other side, your staff will feel appreciated, will have confident and will take more initiative that will benefit your company and will be loyal.

So what does go wrong with the delegation sport?
What situation do you get when the manager does not delegate properly?
The manager spends more time being involved in his staff’s daily activities. The result is staff frustration and lower motivation. Nobody likes having someone looking over his or her shoulder all the time.
The results of such behaviour are many. The most typical are an overworked manager who loses his ability to look at the big picture, wasting his time in things that would be done anyway (remember? he hired competent people) and getting more and more pressure from his own supervisor, as he is having more and more difficulties to meet the deadlines.
Competent people are not interested in working in a messy environment nor are they interested in having the feeling that their boss does not trust them fully. This will result in higher turnover, which will even increase the workload of the overworked manager.
The main cause of bad delegation is fairly simple: an insecure manager who does not trust others.

Comments Off on The fun about delegating | Business Management, Happy at Work, Leadership, Team and Performance | Tagged: Human Resources, Leadership, Management | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Employee turnover, performance indicator of management

April 5, 2009

We all have heard this a million times: employees are the most valuable assets of a company. It sounds great, but in the everyday life, we can see many examples of companies forgetting this nice statement.
So, in the practice, what is the most valuable asset of a company? Did I hear you say it? Yes! Money! Well, this was an easy one, because management reviews the financial weekly and monthly, while they evaluate their employees only once a year, and that is if they ever do. And when they evaluate, in many cases it is only to bring up all the “bad” things they can to discourage the employee to ask for a raise.
Well, this is what mediocre managers do. The good managers know that the quality of financials are a consequence of the quality of the motivation and therefore of the performance of their employees.
Employee turnover is a sign of the quality of the company culture, and this for a simple reason. Why would people leave a company if they are happy and that they are treated fairly? Really, there are not many reasons why they would or should. Most employees would prefer to spend their all lives in the same organization. And most employees go to work with the desire of doing a good job and thus not have any conflict with the boss. Of course, there are always employees who will look to find something somewhere else, but these are a small minority.
The higher the turnover, the lower the morale and the poorer the company culture. For the reasons that I was indicating above about the general employee loyalty and ethics, it will have to take a fair amount of frustration and actually the realization that there is no hope for improvement for an employee to decide to go browse on the job market again. It has been said before, and it is very true: employees do not leave companies, they leave their manager. Ha! That is a good one for you to ponder about when someone leaves your department, isn’t it? Of course, it takes two to tango and there are many reasons why things do not work out the way they should, and maybe another reason for the employee to leave is simply that communicating on the issues at play did not happen. So it also takes two to divorce.
Managers have performance contracts, but these contracts are mostly linked to financial results (the important asset class) and some “non-financial, which in many cases end up to be some interesting project that are never quantified when it comes to their real added-value or degree of difficulty. Very rarely will employee retention (another expression) for employee satisfaction be an integral part of the performance contract.
And this is quite sad, because employee turnover is a plague. It costs a lot, just like it costs a lot to replace a lost customer. First it will cost financially, because the company has to place a job ad, and might have to pay some severance. Then several people in the organization will have to spend time for the selection process and the interviews. Once the new employee is hired, you can be sure that time (time is money) will be spend on training the newcomer, and this period can last up to 6 months, depending on the jobs. Indirectly, it can cost you money too either because people talk and the turnover will eventually give your company a poor reputation and in some cases because the employee who left might attract with him customers away from your company.
Some managers, reading this would say that the turnover is high because they have to fire people. Well, that is another indicator of the quality of the company, as they would not recruit the right people…

Comments Off on Employee turnover, performance indicator of management | Business Management, Happy at Work, Talent at Work, Team and Performance | Tagged: Business Organization, Human Resources, Performance | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier

Intelligent growth

April 4, 2009

Everybody in the business community will tell you: you must grow your business.
But what does this mean exactly? What do you grow? How do you grow?
For having seen the good, the bad and the ugly of growth, these questions are quite important.
My answer is: Grow your business intelligently! And of course, all business leaders do exactly this, don’t they?
Well…
So let’s get back to the basic questions first!

What to grow?
This is the tricky area.
The risk for a successful business is to think that growth will be linear. In other words, if you produce x units and make a profit of y, by growing to 2x you will make 2y profit. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t.
Good business people want to make money and what you should grow is your profit. There is no point of selling more if you do not make more profit, as that means that you do not make money on the extra sales. Then, why invest and hire and complicate your business if you do not have any marginal advantage in doing so? This sounds obvious and yet the number of companies that do exactly the wrong thing is amazing. Volume matters within certain limits but margin must come first.

How do you grow?
The first thing you need to know is how big is the market, who are your competitors, what do they plan to do and how do you compare with them. If they are stronger than you , maybe you should keep a low profile and not go into a frontal confrontation with them.
If you are the stronger player, as most CEO’s like to think of their companies, realize that this does not make you invincible.
The key is a sound and realistic business plan.
Start with the sales plan: how much more can you sell for a profit in the market? Then you have an idea about the required volume of your operations.
Then review all the costs implications that the new situation will create and look at the bottom line. Here the key is to not do any wishful thinking or to make the numbers match because your boss demanded some bold performance from you. A helpful rule of thumb is that you probably will sell only half of the extra volume for the profit you think you can make, and the extra costs will be double of what you expect. Enter these revised numbers in your P&L budget and see what comes out.
Base your assumptions on ambitious but realistic data, and while having a dream is nice, do not let you lead by vain objectives. It is nice to be the largest, only if it makes your company the richest, too. Market share is nice, but it is not an indicator of success, never forget that the force that will drive your ability to get the price you want is the law of offer and demand. Even if you had a market share of 90% but had grown the business beyond what the market can absorb, you will not be able to keep the prices high, and depending on the elasticity for your product, you can very well end up selling at a loss. Always be market-driven!
There is nothing wrong with being conservative. There is much wrong in having your organization taking too many risks.
Another key point in your growth plan is the phasing. You need a longer term view on where you want to be and set yearly goals for your growth plan. Be aware that you can go only one step at a time and that you cannot skip steps. Like with building a house, you start with the foundations, then build the floors one after another, and you do not build floor#2 before you have finished floor#1.
And finally, you have a choice of either growing organically or acquiring another company (see my previous article on M&A).

Remember that the most important for a business is to keep existing, and growth is only one of the ways to achieve this.

Comments Off on Intelligent growth | Business Management, Competitors | Tagged: Business Organization, Business plan, Growth, Mergers & Acquisitions, Performance, Profit | Permalink
Posted by Christophe Pelletier