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Friday Filosophy v.8.27.21

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FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.8.27.21

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, 30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965 was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Churchill was a Sandhurst-educated soldier, a Nobel Prize-winning writer and historian, a prolific painter, and one of the longest-serving politicians in British history, he was a Member of Parliament  from 1900 to 1964.

Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy, aristocratic family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Anglo-Sudan War, and the Second Boer War, gaining fame as a war correspondent and writing books about his campaigns. Widely considered one of the 20th century’s most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe’s liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. He is also praised as a social reformer.  

  • We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
  • A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
  • Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
  • The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
  • Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.
  • A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
  • I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
  • It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
  • The price of greatness is responsibility.
  • My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

The Time is Now

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The Digital Dealership: Change and Remaining the Same

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The Digital Dealership – Change and Remaining the Same

In tonight’s blog, guest writer Mets Kramer continues to speak on the digital dealership with a look at change, and remaining the same.

I often hear, and most of us have said, the following word.  “The equipment business is a relationship business”, “Relationships make the difference”.

Nothing could be truer about this industry.   Our products create long term relationships because each of the products have a long-life cycle during which we need to engage with and support our customers.  Relationships make all the difference during many phases of the machine’s life cycle.  I first learned this lesson dealing with 330 Excavator issues.  This work horse machine was relied upon by many customers, just it had lots of issues.  Cylinders, pumps and final drives to name a few.  Having a strong relationship helped us navigate the problems with the customers and come up with workable solutions and agreements.  Through it all, we maintained the relationship and the next generation of the same machine still had lots of buyers.

So, this is often what I hear from dealers when talking about the development of the Digital Dealership. “Digital isn’t important, it’s a relationship business”. As if relationship is all it takes to maintain a customer. If that were true, we would all still have a roll of quarters in the truck and be looking for pay phones to get a hold of the office and the customer, rather than get a cell phone to get better.

The Truth is, while relationships matter, the digital transformation has supported it all the way and needs to continue to do so.  It’s naive or “old fashioned” to get stuck in the glory of the past.   Just like your cell phone caused the demise of the Pay phone because it allowed you to do things better. The rest of the digital world is there to support you. Not replace you.

This past week I sent my 4Runner in for service.  Just for fun I went online, found the nearest dealer, booked an appointment, chose my preferred communication method, got a quote for the service and discussed additional required services at my mileage. Then I got to the Dealership and talked face to face with the person I’d been emailing with. All my car information was entered, and we wasted no time.  I built a relationship with Jallone the Assistant Service Manager.  He looked after my needs and I tried to steal him from automotive to the equipment business, because he did a great job. When the service was done, he followed up with electronic invoices and discussion on open items.

The Digital dealership supports and improves your existing operations, it does not destroy the value of relationships, it only makes them easier to create and maintain.

Take this example I heard from Alex Kraft at Heave.co this past week. A contractor told him he’s been waiting for 3 weeks to get a quote from his sales rep.  All this customer wanted was a piece of paper (or electronic quote) for a machine, but the sales rep is too busy or the process too onerous to get a quote out. How is it helping that dealer and customer not to have the dealership invest more seriously in digital systems to provide quotes faster. In the end this contractor went to a new platform that exposed his needs to dozens of other dealers, who quoted him automatically or saw the Quote request and responded.

Digital supports your business; it doesn’t take away from it; unless you decide to implement it poorly.

How else does Digital augment your relationship?

A core aspect of the Digital dealership is the use of information.  As the equipment expert your customer relies on, you need to be seen as the trusted advisor, not a quote provider or order taker. Find ways to use digital information to be ready to support your customer with all the equipment related information you can. Specs, performance, analysis, operating cost and market pricing data. When you become the Digitally enabled Trusted Advisor, you’re always welcome.

Oh, and don’t forget to have inventory info at your fingertips and be able to price something.

Years ago, I had dinner with a colleague in Chicago during my only 1.5 years not in the construction equipment business.  He told me a story of being a young regional manager, sitting with his customer.  He proudly boasted about the improvement their business had made in delivery.  He told his customer “We can now ship any product we have in stock to you in a week”.  He was so proud of the giant gain in delivery speed.   His customer looked at him and laughed “You’ve got to be F@#%@ kidding me, from stock to out the door in seven days???”    Expectations are the point.  Your customers have a learned experience of what’s possible.  No matter how good you think you are, if someone is doing it better, that’s the new standard.

Creating a strong Digital Dealership, however that applies to your dealership, improves your relationship with your customer.

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Target Marketing

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Target Marketing

In his guest post for this week, Ross Atkinson highlights the critical importance of technology when it comes to target marketing.

It is truly amazing how times have changed in the last 20 years! Dealerships have gotten larger through consolidation and spread further apart. The dealer is servicing more customers with less staff. Welcome to the world of running “lean and mean.”

The customers aren’t staying small either as they continue to expand in order to survive in this ultra-competitive world. As customers get larger, the likelihood is that someone other than the owner will be the one picking up or dropping off. The days of the customer grabbing a coffee, sitting down for a personal discussion and allowing you to get to know them better, is a faded memory of the good old days.

Technological advances can also be partly to blame for the lack of face-to-face interactions. It’s commonplace today for many transactions to be done without the need of talking to a salesperson by utilizing internet-based ordering systems. Let’s not forget, even if you do visit a bricks & mortar store, you may still have limited verbal communication with a human being considering the availability of digital lookup and self-checkout kiosks. And if the goods aren’t being delivered to your customer’s home or business, the conversation at pickup is trivial at best.

Even if we did have a need for human interaction, we have the next generation of workers who have grown up in an era of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It’s bad enough they don’t teach cursive writing or spelling in schools anymore, but with today’s youth spending countless hours in front of screens growing up, they are missing out on the opportunity to learn social skills with other people like their friends.

So as dealerships lose personal contact with their customers, they look to other means of communication and one of the few things available is technology. Using an automated, self-controlled method of recognizing certain conditions, a notification can be sent to the customer electronically or interactively. I call this “Target Marketing”. It is a term I use for targeting a single customer based on triggers or events that happen every day. Call it what you will, these kinds of systems are available today and can reach out to your customer through some form of digital communication like a text or email. It can let them know that their parts order has arrived or notify them when their machine is due for service. No more manually calling, no more busy signals, no more answering machines, and no more forgetting.

There are an endless number of “triggers or alerts” that can facilitate a communication to your customer. Words of warning though, do not go overboard. Ensure that the most important, time sensitive notifications take precedence. The last thing you want to do is alienate your customer by sending them 15 emails or texts a day.

Having this information sent to your customer’s fingertips can be very beneficial. The immediacy of the message sent to their phone or device allows them to take action right away. For the dealership, it eliminates the need for staff to take time away from their busy day to chase down the customer.

At the same time, the trigger and alert concept can also be used within the dealership to benefit the customer. When a work order is opened for a customer’s machine, wouldn’t it be important to know there is an outstanding recall?

Although the interactions between the dealership and the customer isn’t what it used to be, when you do get an opportunity to be face-to-face, take full advantage of the time to know your customer better. Wish them a Happy Birthday or thank them for their purchase. Ask them how they are doing and what’s happening in their business or personal lives. Your customers will appreciate the attention and interaction; you may actually learn something about them that will improve your relationship.

We should also consider what else computer systems can do to better understand and help the customers. With the collection and analysis of customer transactional data, you can get an understanding of specific patterns which may result in some form of target marketing for things such as bulk purchasing.

This same data analysis can also be significant for your dealership. It can help identify patterns such as peak order times so that you can staff accordingly or ensure that you have the appropriate stocking levels. It may even facilitate changes to your day-to-day business processes.

As you know, Ron’s podcast tagline is “The Time Is Now.” Well folks, if you want to keep in touch with your customers today, you better get on the technology bandwagon! The Time Is Now!

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Friday Filosophy v.8.20.21

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FRIDAY FILOSOPHY c.8.20.21

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970 was a British polymath.

As an academic, he worked in philosophy, mathematics, and logic. His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. He was a public intellectual, historian, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.

Russell was one of the early 20th century’s most prominent logicians, and one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Together with his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead, Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, a milestone in the development of classical logic, and a major attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic (see Logicism). Russell’s article “On Denoting” has been considered a “paradigm of philosophy”.

Russell was a pacifist who championed anti-imperialism and chaired the India League. He occasionally advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would “welcome with enthusiasm” world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Throughout his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he later wrote he had “never been any of these things, in any profound sense”.

  • Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
  • The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts.
  • A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
  • The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
  • Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.
  • I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
  • The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
  • To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

The Time is Now

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The Digital Dealership – Self Serve

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Digital Dealership – Self-Serve 

In tonight’s blog, guest writer Mets Kramer continues to speak on the digital dealership and the freedom it gives us when it comes to self serve.

Satisfying our Self-Serve Desire

Last Month, I did something I haven’t in a long time.  On a trip back home, I came across a Full Serve gas station and used it! These used to be the norm, no one pumped their own gas, and every teenager had a job. Then the world started changing. Gas became more expensive, as did the teens, and self-serve became more common.  Why pay extra and wait for the slow teenager to pump your gas when you just do it yourself and get it done faster and easier? In the same way more and more things have become self-serve.  Self-serve gives us the feeling of moving at the pace we want and reduces the need to interact with other people.  It’s not that we’re asocial, but it does feel like other people slow us down, or we have to wait to get access.

So, now we live in a world that has been designed and tooled to allow us to do things for ourselves, often from our phone.   Even the most “Full Service” new trend is really just self-service.   Ordering your dinner though an app such as Uber Eats, or Door dash is really about satisfying your desire to make things easy and at your pace.   Multiple restaurants are presented to you to review and decide what you’re “cooking for dinner”, payment is processed online, and the food shows up ready to go.  A full Self-Service Experience.

The truth is, each of us are becoming more accustomed to and preferring of Self Service.   It lets us do things when we want, where we want and at our own pace.

Your dealership should be no different.  Your customers are people, like yourself, who increasingly prefer the self-service option.  They want to have more information presented about their decision than if they call a person.  Just like you, your customers research and look up information about what they need on a plethora of sites.  Then they find the easiest way to acquire what they want or need.   This is a significant change from the mindset of the past, which looked to person to person contact for the highest level of service.

So, what are the main aspects of a self-service approach in a Digital Dealership

  1. Provide information
  2. Support the preferred communications methods
  3. Deliver the product/service

First, don’t be short on information.  If you have information to help the customer, make decisions, present it while the customer is in the research phase.  If they don’t find what they are looking for, they, like you, are quick to do a second Google search for what they need.   This information can be presented on open webpages, but also presented only to trusted visitors to your digital dealership.

Next allow your customers to communicate with you the way they want, but don’t “Drop the call”.   Too many dealers drive their customers to forms that end up in email boxes.   The response rate and times are terrible.  If it, was you and any other method, you wouldn’t stand for it.  So why do this to your customers.   Make sure every channel is viewed in real time, during extended business hours.   Make sure contact info is checked and related to your CRM data and finally make sure you respond quickly, and preferably in the format the customer contacted you.

Finally, enable delivery.  By delivery I mean take the transaction as far as possible.  If you’re listing items or services through any of your digital channels, enable an immediate action option.  Call it a “Buy it Now” button.   We are all familiar with that.  This doesn’t mean you have to provide digital payment processing, but you can capture commitment from the customer.  In this case we want to enable and cement the customer’s decision.  When you offer the customer a “Contact Us” form to fill when they want to buy, it leaves the door open for them to keep searching.   A “Buy It Now” button allows the customer to feel like they have solved their problem.

We all think our time is valuable.  We want to make sure the time we spend on resolving a need, is efficiently spent.  This is what has driven our Self Service digitally enabled world.  When I go to Starbucks and order my coffee, I now do it from my app.  It remembers what I want, it pays for me, and I just walk in and grab it from the counter.   That’s a Digital Coffee Shop, supported by a bricks and mortar building with a real human barista.   I always have the option to walk in and have a chat while I place my order, but I can use a digital channel if I’m in a hurry.

Your digital dealership shouldn’t be any different.

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Why do I do what I do?

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Why do I do what I do?

In tonight’s blog, guest writer Ryszard Chciuk asks a question I think we have all wondered at one time or another: Why do I do what I do? 

Contributing to someone’s improvement and understanding is the reason I do what I do.

Who said that? If you don’t know yet, please keep on reading.

This article is about the meaning of one’s live.

Jim Collins said in Good to Great: … it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.

Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning (over 12 million copies sold) says: … striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. Victor Frankl also claims that Man … is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values! He also said: There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. It has been said by a man who survived three years in four German concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

In that book Victor Frankl reminded results of several public opinion polls:  The results showed that 89 percent of the people polled admit that man needs something for the sake of which to live, around 60 percent of the people polled conceded that there was something, or someone, in their own lives for whose sake they were even ready to die. In the statistical survey of 8 thousand students of 48 colleges, conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University, students were asked what they considered “very-important” to them now. 16 percent of the students checked “making a lot of money”; 78 percent said their first goal was “finding a purpose and meaning to my life.”

The polls were made some time ago, but my experience tells me the latest results would be much worse. I mean there are much more students and adults interested in earning more money and fewer people searching for the meaning of their lives. Using Frankl’s words: they are caught in that situation which I have called the “existential vacuum”. For such a man No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

To complete this long introduction, I will remind only one sentence from Friedrich Nietzsche: He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.

A company does not have its brain (at least at the beginning of the 21st century), so it can not suffer from the existential vacuum. The feeling of meaninglessness is not painful for a company. But no organization exists without the brains of its employees and managers. If you, as their leader, are aware that a significant part of your staff is searching for the meaning of their lives or suffering from the existential vacuum, you should help them. I do not expect you will create an internal department of logotherapy. Nevertheless, why you could not extend the medical healthcare package and allow some of your people to visit a logotherapist?

Anyway, I believe the person searching for the meaning of his life will be inspired by the mission of the team he is a part of, and adopt it as a kind of response to his problem. And those who already have a sense of meaning will find that working for you helps them to fulfill their life mission.

My life mission is to leave the world when it is a little bit better than it was before I arrived here. Does it sound general, audacious, pompous? Not for me, but as a manager, I made my mission’s definition more specific. I utilized over twenty years of experience collected during my service for the construction company. In that time, as a machine user and an internal service provider I believed I had learned the basic expectations of all machines’ users:

  • The machine is ready to work always when it is needed
  • The cost of operation is the lowest possible

When I got a chance to attend the creation of a new dealership for Volvo CE, I expressed my new after-sales department mission as follows:

  • We provide machine users with the highest machine availability at the lowest cost of operation,
  • by delivering service works exceeding customers’ expectations,
  • and keeping profitability on the level assuring steady development of the service department and securing financial liquidity of our dealership in a downturn in the economy.

That mission statement became a basic foundation for defining our department’s vision and the main principles (values).

The life mission has to be adapted to the changing conditions, so since I got retired, I feel personally obliged not to spoil our planet to a higher degree than the average homo sapiens does. It comprises also sharing my experience in the construction industry with my successors. I would like them to avoid my mistakes. This is the reason to write posts for the Learning Without Scars blog and to publish articles on my blog dedicated to construction machine users and their closest collaborators – after-sales departments personnel (only in Polish – note: and they are all excellent).

I owe you a response to the question I started my blog post with. This is Ron Slee answer to the most important question a human being has to ask himself: why do I do what I do? Helping students of The Learning Without Scars to succeed is his, and his company mission, his WHY.

Dear reader, what is your mission, what is your WHY, have you already found the meaning for your life?

As Ron says, the time for your answer is now.

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Friday Filosophy v.8.13.21

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Friday Filosophy v.8.13.21

Our Friday Filosophy v.8.13.21 offers thoughts from Aristotle with quotes that highlight the thinking of one of the most influential philosophers the world has ever known. He was a student of Plato and the Tutor to Alexander the great.

Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as “The First Teacher” and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as simply “The Philosopher”, while Dante (one of the most important poets of the Middle Ages) called him “the master of those who know”. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, studied by medieval scholars such as Peter Abelard and John Buridan. Aristotle’s influence on logic continued well into the 19th century. In addition, his ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics.

Aristotle has been called “the father of logic”, “the father of biology”, “the father of political science”, “the father of zoology”, “the father of embryology”, “the father of natural law”, “the father of scientific method”, “the father of rhetoric”, “the father of psychology”, “the father of realism”, “the father of criticism”, “the father of individualism”, “the father of teleology”, and “the father of meteorology.”[8]

  • It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
  • The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
  • The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
  • Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
  • It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
  • You will never do anything in the world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
  • You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
  • The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
  • What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.

The Time is Now.

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Friday Filosophy V8.6.21

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FRIDAY FILOSOPHY V8.6.21

Our Plato quotes put the spotlight on one of the most influential philosophers the world has ever known. He was a student of Socrates and an instructor to Aristotle in the middle fourth century B.C. He grew up in Athens, Greece, and was also influenced by Parmenides and the Pythagoreans.

As Socrates never put anything down in writing, Plato is also known for being Socrates’ primary author and most reliable.

  • Thinking – the talking of the soul with itself
  • Any man may easily do harm, but not every man can do good to another
  • The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men
  • Love is a serious mental disease
  • Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom
  • The measure of a man is what he does with power
  • Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. We do not act ‘rightly’ because we are ‘excellent’, in fact, we achieve ‘excellence’ by acting ‘rightly
  • Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance
  • The greatest wealth is to live content with little
  • The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life
  • Wonder is the beginning of wisdom
  • The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

 

The Time is Now.

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Equipment Data and the Digital Dealership

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Equipment Data and the Digital Dealership

Tonight, to accompany the podcast released on this subject today, guest blogger Mets Kramer continues to educate us on all the digital aspects of our business with a look at equipment data and the Digital Dealership.

When I started Strategic Evolutions in 2017, it was based on two things.   First, I wanted to help smaller dealers do a better job and grow their business. Second, I wanted to show people how to use information to do exactly that.   One of my first engagements was to speak at the Associated Equipment Distributors on the topic “A Granular, Data Driven Approach to Strategic Sales”.  The focus of my presentation was the value and importance of using information, specifically customer equipment data, to drive dealership activities.

Customers work with you, the dealer, for one reason: they own equipment. (And let’s not forget, it’s also because you’re great people!)

Numerous people in the industry have pointed out the value of customer equipment information.   Most frequently, and in the topic of my presentations, the customer equipment information provides a clear indication of future sales opportunities.   Our industry is focused on equipment with a predictable life cycle.  If you’re a dealer representing any OEM, you should be using this information by now, to drive potential sales opportunities and providing your sales reps with new leads.  Furthermore, by analyzing and predicting the replacement time of a machine, it’s the easiest way to make sure low volume customer aren’t lost to competitors.  Think about the customer with only a few machines, who doesn’t engage with the dealership frequently. These types of customers are often lost because they didn’t connect on time. However, if they had used a CRM system to notify the sales rep to reach out at the right time, we could have prevented this loss.  How do you get this information?  Either through the sales team or by digitally engaging with the customer.

Equipment information is just as valuable in aftersales at the dealership. We all know having this information makes parts and service support easier.  For example, customers call with unit numbers because they don’t use serial numbers to reference their equipment.  With a CRM, your team can quickly find the serial number of the customer’s unit from the database.

From a marketing perspective, equipment data can help you measure the potential size of the aftersales market.  If you’re selling maintenance contracts, you already know how many dollars per hour of parts and labor each machine should produce.   With a complete fleet list, you can estimate total potential revenue and market share.    Now, you have a sales lead for your aftersales PSSR reps.

In the Digital Dealership, aftersales should also be utilizing equipment data.   By integrating the equipment data with your Digital Dealership, you can present equipment information in the online parts store, but more importantly, all over your Digital Dealership.  You can promote Parts Kits, PM kits or Maintenance programs to the customer when they visit.  As a comparison, the digital world’s success started when websites stopped being static and started to tune the content to each visitor.  It’s no different with your Facebook, Amazon and countless other social sites.  These businesses present you relevant information based on what they know about you.

To make this all work, it is as simple now as it was 20 years ago.  To build an information driven dealership, your systems need to be up to the task.  An ERP, DMS or CRM that can store customer fleet data is critical and should be a key item to consider when switching to a new Dealer Management System.  If your current system can’t handle customer fleet data, and you’re not switching, get an integrated CRM. Next, make sure you have your sales and aftersales teams think about collecting this data.  If it becomes a normal part of your conversations throughout the dealership, and a focus of your customer service, gathering the data gets easy.

Finally, invest in a partner or team member who’s full or part time job it is to analyze the data and implement programs using the data, with the business unit owners.  Your sales manager or product support manager needs support.  Most of the dealers I know have limited resources in house, so it might mean a new person or finding a vendor to help you.

One thing is for sure, and you see it all around you, the most successful businesses today, have a strong digital presence and use the information they have to their advantage and their customer’s benefit.

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A Watchkeeper or a Beekeeper?

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A Watchkeeper or a Beekeeper?

In “A Watchmaker or a Beekeeper,” guest blogger Bruce Baker walks you through the main personality types in leadership roles, and how they can impact your business.

Low morale, low profits, lack of employee engagement, high turnover and rampant gossip can be attributed to a company being led by either a Watchmaker or a Beekeeper – care to guess which one is the culprit?

If you guessed Watchmaker, you’re right!

In James Fischer’s book, Navigating the Growth Curve, a Watchkeeper is a person who needs most business components to be predictable – something they can control at all times. They believe that to be effective, the “business machine” must be controlled by its operators. This is their overarching purpose of management – to control the business. They further believe that the machine exists for its builders’ primary purpose: to generate as much money as possible for its owners/stakeholders.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with making as much money as possible. Still, it is essential that building an intentional business must be done sustainably over the long term. This includes not profiting at the expense of the company’s employees and stakeholders. The better approach is as you might have guessed by this stage, is being a Beekeeper.

Beekeepers are always mindful and have hindsight and foresight when managing and growing their business. Instead of rejecting or resisting the complexity and chaos that certainty comes with business growth, Beekeepers embrace complexity and, at times, chaos by allowing their teams’ or hive’s intelligence to be the operator instead of themselves exclusively. They appreciate and understand that their business is a living and intelligent organism, and if allowed, will generate far more innovative ideas and sustainable solutions. As a result, the Beekeeper’s business will continually self-organize around its problems and challenges.

When reading the fable in Navigating the Growth Curve, Horace’s recommendation is for Peter to become more like a Beekeeper to capitalize upon his team’s collective intelligence. Peter initially tried very much to control every aspect of his team, causing anger, hostility, and disengagement, leading to a downward spiral that could have been prevented by merely asking for their input.

This is a hard lesson that business owners/leaders can’t seem to learn often enough. Unfortunately, we regularly find far more Watchmakers than Beekeepers primarily due to individuals insisting that they should have all the answers and asking for their employees’ input may put them in a negative light. This is far from the truth! The opposite is true.

There is a Beekeeper in all of us. Still, during our day-to-day challenges as business leaders intending to do the right thing, our Watchmaker tendencies take over more than often without us even realizing it.

The 7-Stages of Growth concepts and programs offered by Workplaces are designed to help leaders predict how complexity will affect them, focus their efforts and resources on the right things at the right time and adapt to their company’s needs as their business grows.

I want to share the first steps in the journey of becoming a Beekeeper referencing the 7 Stages of Growth Model and the Business X-Ray we take our clients through. We emphasize that the only complexity in any business is its people, starting with the business owner during this exercise. The business owner and the leadership team’s ability to embrace this complexity and leverage its power will take the company and team to the next level.

Let me share the initial 4-steps we start within the Business X-ray session that will set you on the course of business growth success.

  1. Recognize the intelligence of the team by asking its opinion.

As scary as this can be, once you have it behind you, you will be amazed at the results and the amount of ‘anxiety’ it can take off your plate. Most leaders we work with hesitate to ask for their team’s input/feedback. Many reasons come to mind, but the following are the regular reasons we come across:

  • How can they possibly know enough about the company to give me advice?
  • They’ll use it as a ‘bitch’ session, and I’ve heard enough of that.
  • I don’t have time to take their suggestions – I have my issues to deal with.
  • If I ask them for their opinion, they’ll expect me to do something with it, and I have enough to do right now.

Leading is all about learning how your company and the team think and feel can only be brought about by asking and engaging.

  1. Filter out the noise

Noise is only too common in the business world today. Too many things are important, leaving nothing that is truly “important.”  There are too many agendas that are not leveraged into concise plans of action, leading to low levels of focus and execution.  Once the team’s power is recognized and leveraged (i.e., all voices and their opinions are encouraged), critical issues are brought to the surface and problems are solved.  During the Business X-Ray session, key initiatives are identified with detailed action plans ensuring results are achieved.

  1. Unify the team around the plan

Once the key initiatives from the X-Ray are identified, the work begins. Communicate this information to the rest of the company either through group and individual meetings or the entire company at one time.  Ensure that each initiative has a ‘champion’ – someone willing to be the ‘team lead’ on getting to the end goal. A lot of work? You bet, but the rewards are well worth it!

  1. Implement organic and self-organizing systems reinforcing change

Organic and self-organizing systems include people engaging and achieving results together. This essentially allows the team to put their handprint on solutions and subsequent systems and processes that produce results. Leaders are working less hard and far smarter with less direct supervision, control, and micro-management.  Allowing this to happen brings about a path of least resistance which anyone in chaotic environments would strive for.

Practice being a Beekeeper and minimize the amount of time you spend as a Watchmaker. The results will be empowering for not just your team but for you as well.

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