Feeding and Starving the Right Parts

Getting a business owner focused on value requires some basic logic that for some reason is incredibly difficult. It has to do with the fact that no-one likes being told their baby is ugly. Many business owners are too attached to certain parts of the business, making it hard to grow the company. Think of it like a garden which produces different vegetables. Some vegetables are more profitable than others. Those vegetables that sell the most fail to get fertilizer and attention because the gardener is so in love with his tomatoes, but tomatoes make no money. Farmers who are good business people change crops according to what will bring in the highest income. 

Improving the Budgeting Process

One of the most non-value-added activities within financial management is budgeting. Budgets are prepared to allocate and control how resources will be used in the future. Unfortunately, the future is hard to predict and upper-level management doesn't always communicate with people who prepare budgets. Because of poor communication, budgeting becomes an exercise in futility. Some of the problems associated with budgeting include:

Gamification 101

According to the Gartner Group, over 70% of the global 2000 companies now have at least one gamified process. Gamification is a way of improving how you engage with end-users. This typically takes place on some type of online platform – making the experience more fun and rewarding for customers, employees, or business partners. Many gamification applications will issue badges, points or some other incentive for active participation. A simple example is to allow users to vote thumbs up or thumbs down or Likes on Facebook.

Getting out of the Quantitative World

The world is highly quantitative – it’s all about the metrics and meeting the numbers. Everyone is counting something – number of customer complaints, number of web visits, percentage increase in sales, and the list goes on and on. With so much emphasis on the quantitative side, the qualitative side gets lost and it is the qualitative stuff that is becoming more important. One reason qualitative information gets de-emphasized is that it is difficult to measure. If we can’t measure it, then it gets ignored. This is one of the fallacies with financial reporting; things like talent, leadership and brand recognition are no-where to be found on the financial statement. But these qualitative characteristics are the real drivers of performance and they warrant more attention in today’s quantitatively obsessed world.  

Embracing UX Design

Growing and maintaining a product now requires recognition of User Experience or UX Design. Even service oriented companies should pay attention to UX Design because the world is so digital and connected – your online presence requires great UX design.  Regrettably, many companies have yet to embrace the concepts of UX design. 

Putting Emphasis on Knowledge Assets

Knowledge workers are a critical source of value and in today’s world of intellectual assets, they represent your only competitive advantage. The fact that so many companies struggle to attract and retain top talent attests to a much deeper problem – your existing knowledge assets are poorly managed. There is enormous waste every day in every company. It stays hidden out-of-sight with too much emphasis on the day to day operational stuff. It has to do with not leveraging your knowledge and people like you should.

BADIR: A Simple Approach to Analytics

The best companies in the world have embraced data analytics. They know how to capture and analyze data for continuously solving problems and improving the bottom line. Unfortunately, analytics is often lacking for less sophisticated or smaller companies. One way to put analytics into your business is to follow the BADIR Formula:

SEO: An Inconvenient Truth

If you expect to get noticed in this global connected world, you are going to have to embrace something called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It seems every year someone declares SEO is dead. Yes, SEO is very difficult and it does require a serious commitment of time and money. But take a hard look at your competition and see how effective they are over the internet. They haven’t updated their website in over six months, they still have fixed tables for presenting content and they continue to ignore the mobile world. Also think about the fact that there are over a half a trillion web sites online. So even if you do just basic SEO, you are bound to realize some big benefits that can help your company in the long run.

In Pursuit of the Micro Moment

For the last few years Google has been spending a lot of time trying to understand something called the micro-moment. The micro-moment is the time between researching a product or service and the time a person makes the buy decision. It is during this slice of time that the brain tells the person; yes you should (or should not) buy this product or service. Understanding the brain and a person’s emotional response during these micro-moments has become very important for marketers. This behavioral approach to marketing is often referred to as Neuro-Marketing.   

Hand Shakes vs. Lawyers

We live in a world where timely execution is critical. Obstacles and delays can be detrimental to many businesses in this fast paced changing world. What helps is when you can trust someone based on a handshake and get things done quickly before having to execute legal agreements. Yes, this may fly in the face of a more cautious and traditional view of business which advocates, get everything in writing and make sure you hire a lawyer. However, this traditional view of business is increasingly not grounded in the reality of how people need to get things done.