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The Evolution of Business Owners

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The Evolution of Business Owners

Change is just one inevitability in life. Guest writer Floyd Jerkins walks us through just one change in his piece on the evolution of business owners.

It is quite rare for a dealership to be able to adequately plan succession in the ranks of their mid-management staff. So often, a manager must be replaced in quick order. In that instance, should you look for a replacement within your ranks, or should you go outside to find a suitable replacement? What are the critical skill sets that predict success? What kind of training will the new manager need to have a reasonable chance for longevity in the position and the potential for career growth?  

The problem is that these decisions are often made in haste. A good parts salesperson certainly will be a good parts manager, right? It only makes sense that an outstanding technician who knows your products and your customers will be a natural as the next service manager. However, making this most obvious choice in many instances has led to an unfortunate professional and personal lack of fit that has hurt the dealership and an outstanding employee.

If these issues arise at the mid-level management, what is the big picture view of the dealership owner? Where is the career path of a dealer principal? Can an owner be quickly replaced? How does the owner become better educated and identify the right resources for their personal learning pathway? What are the skill sets that predict success?

The Evolution of Owners’ Skill Sets

With one store doing $10M in sales, the competencies for an owner typically require them to be able to change a tire, handle bookkeeping, sell a piece of equipment and maybe even stock the soda machine. They probably do all the hiring and firing. They have to wear several hats. 

Many owners of single-store operations come from a sales background. Where do they learn to sell? In my experience, these owners hardly ever take a professional selling course or become constant readers of sales-related material. They learn on the job and through trial and error. The issues this causes in the day-to-day operations is a whole other topic of discussion. 

Developing a business that has $1M sales per employee with revenue from $50M to over a $1Billon requires different skill sets. The knowledge, skills, and attitude must improve to be adequately prepared for what is yet to come. As an owner expands their operation, the plan of getting personal education should grow as well. 

Owners Learning Pathway During the Stages of Consolidation 

We know that with consolidation in any market, the organizations continue to grow larger. Will all of them follow this model? The answer to that is no. Every market has movers and shakers while still supporting the smaller operations. But make no mistake, consolidation reshapes local and regional markets. I call it Shark or Bait. When owners are not proactive; they are often forced to make hard decisions before they might be ready. 

Once the organization achieves a certain size and scale, the business becomes less about what industry you’re in and more about adapting to the best practices highlighted by successful companies. This requires the owner to have a new vision and different skill sets. 

There still seems to be a lengthy discussion going on about whether or not hard skills are more or less important than soft skills. I’ve said for years that what has been commonly called soft skills are now hard skills. You can’t ignore them because they are a fundamental part of leading a company and for your teams of champions to achieve peak performance. 

The key to enduring success lies within the people who deliver the day-to-day operations. They must be in harmony with the policies, procedures, and methods of operations to reach peak performance. The owner or owner group is still setting the pace and controlling many of the businesses’ outcomes with their decisions every day. With an operation of 30, you can meet with everyone and change a policy in almost a day. With over 300 employees, policy changes must be carefully thought out and creating an implementation plan is critical or it could take months and months to become reality. 

Business Owners Are People, Too

Each business owner is unique with strengths and weaknesses, just like everyone else. Just because they own the company doesn’t automatically give them all the necessary skills to be an effective leader. Instead of trial by fire, business owners can develop a method to go through a learning pathway that will provide the foundation for success. Assessing their own competencies isn’t something that comes naturally. Commonly outside influencers are needed to affect real change. 

  • Learning from your peers is an excellent method. These working sessions are normally financial discussions that can reveal many operational issues and hopefully the best practices to learn from. Taking these ideas back and implementing them is another story in itself. Often, an owner may be uncomfortable bringing out certain subjects or need in-depth or more customized information. That’s where one-on-one coaching becomes extremely valuable. 
  • A challenge many businesses owners experience is that sometimes the ego gets in the way or needs to get out of the way. Leading by ego is a sure way to disassemble a great organization and push people away. Success often fuels the ego, and it becomes the master. I’ve helped many leaders learn how to tame this trait and use their natural talents. Ego is a tool to use, but not to have it become our master. 
  • Personal education requires a pathway so you invest time learning what you need to learn. Time is precious. If you don’t have this plan, then you are “wondering” and “wandering” with your time and energy. You should know how you learn best, is it visual, auditory or kinesthetic? Knowing yourself allows for the most impact to be made and having some fun while you do it. 
  • There are numerous trade publications that are required reading, but you shouldn’t limit yourself to this one area. Industry-specific material should be accompanied with broader-based business material, listening to podcasts, online webinars, and attending in person events. 
  • There is so much material available and through various mediums that you must be careful about what information you allow into your brain. Too much of the wrong information will easily steer you away from what matters the most. Verify the sources of the material and vet the author. There is a lot of junk out there today with people making sound bites sound like in-depth knowledge. 
  • You can get so involved in running the business that it just doesn’t seem like you can take time away to learn. Sure, time management and effective delegation strategies are part of the solution, but there is more to the whole equation. The reality is that you can’t afford not to take the time to get formal and informal education. Knowledge is power and is the stimulus to building an enduring organization. 

What is your learning pathway? Once this is prescribed, then you have focused learning that brings about the most substantive changes. 

Self-Evaluation Can Lead to Happiness and a Dynamic Lifestyle

Be honest with yourself about what you’re good at. Listen to others about who you are vs. who you think you are. There are numerous “outside-in” assessments and methods to evaluate your knowledge, skills, and attitudes. “Find what you are good at and hire the rest.” There are just some skill sets that you can’t master and knowing this is powerful. Set the ego aside so once you hire them, don’t micromanage. Get out of their way and let them do what you hired them to do. 

Finally, be sure to put yourself into a position to have some fun. If what you do in the company isn’t generating that fun factor, change your role. One of the privileges of owning a business is that you can change your role to something that is a better fit for where you are in age, business acumen, and above all, the desire to live a dynamic life. Remember, there is a life after owning a business. 

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Challenges to Leaders Are All Around Us

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Challenges to Leaders are all around us.

We are living in an era of great change: socially, politically, environmentally, technologically and in nearly every aspect of our lives. This presents wonderful opportunities for us while at the same time it represents threats. As a nation while we are excitedly and anxiously awaiting events and advancements we have had to deal with the pandemic. This has given us time to reflect on how we live our lives, how we do things and what is important. Most of us are not creating these events or advancements – there are other people and businesses doing that for all of us.

But we have to navigate our way through these changes. Change is not something that mankind has embraced easily over time. Change, although positive in the long run, can be daunting for most of us in the short term. When we put into perspective the world in which we live and compare the changes we are experiencing to previous generations we sometimes think we are moving ever faster in the pace of change.

However, the rate of change that we are experiencing is an exponential curve that really started to have an impact in the mid 1800’s. Let me share a short story here. The electric engine arrived in the mid-1800s and industry immediately starting replacing steam engines with the new electric engines. This was a very dramatic change.

Yet most Industries did the same thing. All that we did was change the engine from steam power to electrical power. We didn’t change much in the way of the methods or procedures at all, that was left for another generation. You see, these two events, changing the power source AND changing processes and methods would have been too much to absorb in society at one time. It took a new generation before new processes and methods were changed and then productivity change accelerated.

It seems like resistance to change can be so powerful, that it can hold back productivity gains. This begins to make sense when we realize that the changes that are made that increase productivity, to some degree increase risk for the work force. So, leadership becomes even more critical when we are faced with times of great change.

The time is now.

For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Change #MondayBlogs

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The past two weeks I spent reviewing two great dealers in Europe. One was in Norway and the other in Belgium. They were both family owned businesses with a strong history and terrific presence in their markets.

What I wanted to point out, however, is not how good they are at what they do, nor how skilled their employees are or how well their leadership executes strategies. No, it is how they view change.

Each part of the world seems to view change through a different lens. In North America one would think that American Companies would be right our front about innovation and change. Not so fast. In Canada you might be thinking about the conservative Canadian being more entrenched in tradition and not that open to change. Hang on there. Europe with all the centuries of tradition would be another case. Similarly, the South and Central America, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, Russia and Africa. All areas approach the need to change differently.

Change is difficult and except for a very small number of us would not be part of our lives. We love predictability. We struggle to learn how to live on our own, or the changes required when we get married or have children. We struggle to learn our jobs and get good at them. And once we get comfortable with our lives BAM along comes change.

I grew up in the late fifties and sixties, the 1900 version folks. Do you think the “baby boomers” see and have seen change? For starters think about this: The “Baby Boomers” were the first generation to have credit cards. No matter what you think about credit cards they have had a dramatic impact on the lives of everyone in the developed world. But the element of the credit card that I want to focus on is the unintended consequence of debt. We all have too much debt. Right? Look at governments, then look at credit card debt, then look at student debt. Need I say more?

Next look at Technology. I took a minor at University in Computer Science and learned how to “wire” Unit Record equipment. That is true. Most people would think about Unit Record computing in the same way that they would think about an “Outhouse” and indoor plumbing. But look how far the “computer” has come in the last seventy-five years. The last set of disc drives that I had to purchase cost over $1,000,000 that is right one million dollars. There were two banks of disc drives each four drives requiring a control unit. Each disc drive held a removed 44-megabyte storage unit. That eight-disc drive set up gave me 352 mega-bytes of disc storage and the cost was more than $1,000,000. Imagine that. Today I can buy a thumb drive with 8 GIGA-BYTES of storage for less than $20.00. How about that? Then we have cellular telephones. They are everywhere. They didn’t exist a short ten years ago. And what about AI, Artificial Intelligence? Big Blue, from IBL, beats the best chess player in the world. Watson wins Jeopardy. The self-driving car, the Roomba Robot vacuum, photography and on and on and on.

Jack Welsh, when he was CEO of General Electric is famous for saying “when the world around you is changing at a rate faster than you are, the end is near.” Look around you. The world is changing very quickly and shows no signs of letting up anytime soon.

We need to embrace change as difficult as that might seem to many of you. To resist change is to be run over. So, look around. What could you do differently? What do you do that you don’t even need to do anymore? The world will be a better place and your job will be more enjoyable if you do things more effectively. The only thing in life that we don’t have enough of is time. Take advantage of all the time you are given. Make you job and your world a better place.

The Time is NOW.

Where Do We Go From Here?

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In our last post, we talked about thinking outside the box (or triangle).

For those of you who have previously taken our classes, you know I often ask about “the box.”  Why is there a box?  Who decided to get me into this box in the first place?  I hate the idea of being penned into one set of ideas and one way of thinking nearly as much as I HATE discounts.  You are all well aware that I hate discounts immensely.

I think that doing things the way we have always done them is what constitutes the box we find ourselves stuck in so much of the time.  It is human nature to find a routine to follow.  It’s against our nature to reassess that routine and push for change.

Every time someone tells me that change isn’t all that difficult, I tell them to go home and suggest to their spouse or partner that they switch sides of the bed.

Change is tough.  Pushing for change and constantly striving to stretch and grow has a lot to do with changing our way of thinking.  To gain a different perspective, we must see differently.  To see differently, we must look, as Proust said, with new eyes.  To have those new eyes, we need a new mindset.

Education is key.

This year, let’s challenge ourselves to grow and stretch and move our paradigms with ongoing education.

That’s the way to find constant growth and improvement, both within our careers, and within ourselves.

The time is now.

The More Things Change #MondayBlogs

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News from Learning Without Scars.

We have been busy around here for the past six months or so and you have been able to enjoy a rest from my incessant blabbering on about something or other.

I will bore you with some of the details that have interrupted the nice flow of life.

I suspect the thing of most interest is that Marlene and I have finally moved to Hawaii. We have been planning this for what seems like forever and have finally done it. As of December 29, 2016, we became residents of Hawaii. We didn’t have to move furniture as we purchased a furnished apartment. However, there was a lot of housekeeping with closing businesses in California and opening them in Hawaii. Getting banks set up and post offices and accountants and lawyers. You know the drill. Thankfully Marlene is the professional at these items and I don’t have to worry too much about them at all. But it is a lot of pressure on Marlene.

That is the positive side of things and of course there is a negative side as well. The Yin and Yang of life continues. Our daughter Caroline, her spouse Joanna, and our grandchildren are still in California. Not being able to see them on impulse is not so much fun. We miss them and their growing up and life experiences and their energy. We have to adjust our approaches as a family when we are together and really take advantage of every minute we are able to be together.

Another thing that happened is that I have completely stopped soliciting consulting work. I have clients, to be sure, that continue want to work with me in the businesses. I am blessed with wonderful clients. We started the consulting business in June 1980 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada not too far from where I was born in Mannville, Alberta.

I am not sure but I think winding down the business has been more traumatic for me than starting it was in the first place. One was hard work, while the other is emotional work. You have an identity as a worker that to some degree defines who you are and when you stop doing the work you have the potential to lose who you are. I am sure someone could say that much more eloquently than I, perhaps Caroline.

Then we created Learning Without Scars in 2015. Well it is now a Hawaii Corporation and the California business was closed as of December 2016. While that was going on Caroline was doing the yeoman’s work in converting all of our learning products to an internet based Learning Management System, and getting all this material fresh copyrights and trademarks. Our training business started with Quest Learning Centers. We started with Classroom courses with three levels and four modules per level. These management training programs were created in the early 1990’s. We took that material and compressed it into Webinars starting in the early 2000’s. But as a teacher, I wasn’t happy with the format of a slide show with a voice talking – so we changed things and used a high definition camera and injected me walking into the camera frame and talking to the learners on their computers. Those of you that know me know I like to talk. With the internet option, we had to convert these webinars, of which we had developed over ninety different programs, to the Learning Management Software. This meant a heavy learning curve for Caroline and a lot of work for me. Everything had to be redone. The text content all had to be updated and upgraded. Then we needed to create audio files to go with the text. Then we had to run prototypes so we could have input from actual learners. Those learners wanted to inject me into the program like we had in the webinars so we are working with a Professional, Paul Baumann, from XFINIGEN Media, and creating Vimeo files which we will insert into the learning products.

We have the new website created by Brian Shanahan, who did a wonderful job in presenting us to the world. Brian has upgraded on R.J. Slee site so that the “look and feel” is similar.

And finally, I think, Caroline is working with the IACET, The International Association of Continuous Education Training to have all of our learning programs certified so that they will earn CEU’s, Continuous Education Units credits that would apply to Colleges, Universities and Junior Colleges across the world. That, too, is a big task but one that will bring us, we believe, nice results.

We have been, and continue to be, busy. Life is good.

I don’t know how many of you know that my mother was a teacher, a well-recognized teacher in her day as one of the pioneer teachers of the Pittman reading program, which accelerated the ability of very young children to read. Kindergarten and Grade One specifically were reading newspapers and comprehending. My grandmother was a teacher. She received her Master’s Degree from the University of Manitoba in 1913. Granny, or “Granny the Great” as Caroline called her, taught in a one room school house and I had the pleasure of meeting several of her students when they attended her eightieth birthday party. I suspect she had an impact on them, don’t you?

Well I started as a teacher, first at a country club in the Laurentians, north of Montreal, teaching summer sports. Then moving to an instructor position with McGill University, which morphed in two programs within the Department of Physical Education from Teaching students how to teach swimming and also how to Coach the Swimming discipline. I am quite pleased that several of my students went on to coach at the national level for men and women in the Olympics and Commonwealth games. I had to give up the McGill teaching when I started at the caterpillar dealer in Quebec, Hewitt Equipment. My daughter Caroline is a teacher. She teaches in the California School System. We must have some teaching chops in the genes. I know I get excited when I see the lights go on in peoples’ eyes when they “GET” something.

But one thing I can tell you is that Learning is HARD. I know we have been told how to learn over and over again. It is repetition. Do it over and over again ad nausea. That never really worked for me so that is not how I taught. I wanted to people to understand something so that they would remember it. Not memorize it so they could forget it.

It turns out that the instructions from schools and teachers about highlighting and underlining and sustained reading and rereading notes and texts are not that appropriate. Endel Tulving, a psychologist, at the University of Toronto challenged this traditional model of learning and remembering through a series of investigations starting in the mid-1960’s. Tulving found that the learning curves were statistically indistinguishable between the tried and true learning pattern recommended above and random learning models that were not based on repetition. Well that is how we have designed the internet learning programs. We want you to Learn and to Know, not to memorize.

I am excited about this new venture and we are busy releasing new programs every month. We have the first two years of the management and supervision in the market now. We also have the first program for a specific job function, the first of many, which we released in March. It is for the Telephone and Counter sales personnel in the Parts Business. More on the product side in future blogs.

Well that is it. I hope you understand better now what has been happening and why there has been such a gap in my communicating with you.

The last time I wrote here was when I introduced “Socrates” our mascot. Talk to you soon.

The time is now.

Friday Filosophy #2016-26

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Well I enjoyed Independence Day and I hope you did as well. Then we had an interruption in life with some surprise surgery in the family. Everything is going well again and we are back to our Friday Filosophy #2016-26.

We continue to see the attack on the status quo in Turkey tonight and hope that everything can be resolved with little loss of life. 

Some quotes on adapting to change.

 

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

Stephen Hawking

 

Reasonable men adapt to the world around them: unreasonable men make the world adapt to them. The world is changed by unreasonable men.

Edwin Louis Cole

 

Adapting is a common, natural way for people to adapt to their environment.

Joe Barton

 

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

H.G. Wells

 

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

Marcus Aurelius

 

Enjoying success requires the ability to adapt. Only by being open to change will you have a true opportunity to get the most from your talent.

Nolan Ryan

 

The time is now.