Leverage yourself and your resources

Effective people know to focus their attention and their resources on the small number of tasks that get the greatest results. It's called the eighty-twenty rule - eighty percent of the results produced by a person or a business are produced by twenty percent of the work. 

There's nothing magic about the "eighty percent" number. Just remember that smart people know to leverage themselves and their impact by putting their attention and their resources where they'll get the greatest results. 

The trick is in knowing which work and resources will get the results they want.

What are the driving forces in the business? That's where you put your attention.

What elements of value drive the customer's purchase decision? That's where you put your attention.

What business systems are the ones that get the most important results? That's where you put your attention.

What are the highest priorities for work to be done? That's where... well, you know.

This basic principle of business development asks you to figure out what "drives" your business, your customers, your employees, and to focus your attention on those drivers.

If ever there was a part of management that that has the potential to cause frustration, it is delegation.  So often the manager who delgates tasks to others complains of disappointment about results produces by delegatees that one wonders about what went wrong.

For some managers, delegation is an opportunity to pass work off to others that dont want to do themselves, in other words, to pass the buck to someone else and walk away from the problem.  This can be called abdication, and it inevitably leads to problems sooner or later.

This is not true delegation in any sense of the word.

The fundemental problem here is lack of responsibility on the part of the manager, and abdication from accountability for ensuring that the task is completed properly, within time, with the correct resources, and with a proper feedback mechanism in place.

A recent posting on the Slow Leadership Blog is headed "Delegation is Art and Science" defines delegation as:

"the act of assigning responsibility and resources for a task, holding or process to a subordinate".

This is followed by the statement "In effect, you sublet your work. Because they remain your subordinate, the task ultimately remains your responsibility. Since you chose to delegate this to them, you proactively decided they could handle the situation".

Now that's a whole different situation from the abdication example given above and it requires a whole lot more work on the part of the manager. This work can be summarised in three brief steps:

1. Communicate the task or responsibility.
2. Give the resources needed to accomplish the task.
3. Compare results to expectations then adjust.

Those three steps involve a lot of skills from the manager, both in terms of supervision and also in personal relationship between the manager and the delegatee.  The dynamics change over time as the delegatee grows their own level of skill and gains increased confidence in completing the tasks.

So, delegation is one of the key tools in the kit that forms the art and scince of management. If it is used badly, the results will be poor.  When used properly and with skill, the business gains and the parties to the delegation gain also.

I recomend that you read the full article on the Slow Leadership Blog as it expands on the comments above and provides some further context to the art and science of delegation.

So you want to grow sales in your business?

You have two main choices, sell more to the customers you already have, or find new customers to whom you can sell, or both.

Let's have a look at the second option. For the sake of this discussion we will assume for the moment that you have exhausted the possibilities for selling more to existing customers.

If you want more customers, where do you start? Let's start by looking at the customers you already have and ask the question, "how can I find more customers who are like my best customers?"

If your sales or accounting systems are able to provide you with the information, sort your list of "sales by customer" for the last year (say) in decending order from greatest to least sales.  You need to be careful here that the results are not skewed by a few large sales which are outside the norm of how you do business. 

Now look at the list and segment it into five equal groups by number of customers. This divides the number of customers into 20% segments. Total the value of sales for each 20% segment and analyse the results.  You may be surprised to learn that a sizeable proportion of you sales, maybe 70%-80% are delivered to your business by customers in the top 20% segment.

What about the next 20% segment? How are these customers different from the top 20%?  And the segment after that?

If you are able to segment your customers by trade or business type and sort sales by this type of segment, what can you discover here?  What about by type of product or service purchased? For people who are smart with spreadsheet software, sorting customer data with pivot tables can reveal some very interesting results, especially in a customer type/product type matrix. But let's not get too complicated.

Now it's time to ask some probing questions. Who are your best customers? What do you know about them? Where can they be found?  What similarities do they have? What do you know about their buying preferences?  How do I treat them that is different from how other customers are treated? What is it that makes them "best" customers for my business? Who else sells to customers like these?

There are many questions you can ask, and you need to ask them if you wish to discover the best approach to attracting them to your business. Some of those questions relate to demographic characteristics and other to psychographic charcteristics. Demographic characteristics are those that you can generally count, measure or observe such as genda, age, income, lifestyle choices etc. Psychographic characteristics are generally about behavoural observations such as emotions, likes and dislikes, choices and preferences, comfort and discomfort, and so on.

Using your new found knowledge about who your best customers are, you can now develop strategies to target other similar prospective customers in your trading area knowing more about what and how they buy, and what is important to them and the business relationship they want with you.

Its time to do some analysis and thinking now!

If you don't have the knowledge or resources to do this yourself, seek help from someone who does. "Cloning your Best Customers" is a foundational marketing topic in Full Spectrum Business Development coaching.

One the first things I do each morning is to check for new blog posts for blogs that I subscribe to.  One blog that I always get real value from is Carmine Coyote's Slow Leadership Blog.  This post on Time and Effort Saving Ideas for Busy People particularly caught my attention.

So you've had a great year.  Sales are up, profits are up and your customers are ecstatic about the levels of service that your business delivers.  It's the culmination of all the hard work and money you've put into your business over the years.  You're feeling very pleased with yourself. 

But wait a minute.  Did you do it all by yourself?  If you are a one person business then you probably did, but not necessarily.

Even the very smallest of businesses has to rely on others for all kinds of inputs required to deliver satisfaction to customers.  If you are a tiny business, you reward your suppliers and contractors by paying the agreed rate on time, as promised.

However, if your business employs other people to do some of the work, they are part of the successful outcomes that your business delivers.  The results of your business are the product of actions by everyone who works there.

Sure, they get rewarded by the payment of wages and the occasional pat on the back.  But is that the only share of the cake they will receive?

In ancient times, when the view of the world was much smaller than it is now and resources were believed to be finite, everyone shared in the production of food and the necessities of life, and everyone shared in the results according to their needs.  This was because resources were scarce and care for one's neighbour and community was required as a matter of survival.

In today's world this community view appears to have been largely lost, with the prevailing culture being "everone for himself".

But no man is an island.  Whether we like it or not, everyone still depends on someone else to ensure his or her survival.  It's just the way the world works.

So when you have had a bumper year, how will you share the spoils in a way that reflects the contribution others have made to your business?