Your are the CEO. The entrepreneur. Your passion fuels this business. Day in, day out, round the clock, you are thinking of growing and improving the company. You are 200% consumed by it and expect your staff to be as well.

You need your team to stay late to meet a deadline, or come in early to deal with an emergency. You want them to think, live, breath the company to beat the competition and continually emerge as the winner. Rightfully so, you expect them to know that if they take care of the clients, the company would do better and that’s what is required for them to continue to have a gainful employment.

Yet, success requires more than a simple quid pro quo relationship of “You work for me, and I pay you”. Success requires your entrepreneurial passion to be present in every facet of the business.

If you expect your employees to treat the company’s problem as their own, then you need to treat their problems as your own.

Do Whatever It Takes

Take the time to understand what is occupying the mind of your team. Reach out to them, be a good listener, and genuinely do whatever it takes to solve the problem. Don’t do lip service. If there is nothing you can do, offer them time off so they reconcile on their own.

You may ask, how can I afford this. If everyone stops working due to their personal problems, how do I run the company. In return I say, you can’t afford not to do this.

Even if you think about it in the most analytical, even borderline selfish way, you will recognize that you pay your team for progress, not for showing up at work, clocking in, warming a seat and clocking out. If one is pre-occupied with personal issues, they will be substantially less productive and will most likely influence the rest of the team in a negative way.

Yet, if you assist them to quickly solve their problem, not only you have gained their productivity back, you have also earned their respect and loyalty. They feel one with the company and next time the company at large, or a team member needs help, be it business or personal, they will jump to help.

Now, the company’s problems are their problems. Leading by example, you have infused your passion in your team which in all likelihood will become your largest competitive advantage.

Will it Become a Free For All?

One of the beauties of running an open company is that abuses and disingenuous actions quickly become apparent. As part of your loyalty to the entire team, you must swiftly address abuse. Interestingly enough, employees do recognize that a few people can ruin it for all, and will also rise to the occasion and guide others to not confuse the company’s compassion with a free pass.

Loyalty and the CEO Grade

If we went by the book and our performance as CEOs was being graded by MBA students, many of us, including some legendary CEOs we have all read about, would get a failing grade.

As the numbers go, the moment an employee is not carrying his/her weight, they must be cut and room should be made for replacements.

However, in most instances these purely by the numbers short-sighted savings cost us dearly in the long-term. It ruins the winning attitude throughout the company. Employees will only do the minimal effort to keep their job and will project the company’s attitude directly back. While you may not be within an earshot and hear it, the conversation in the hallway goes as “The company does not care about me, why should I bust my butt for it”.

You understand that the market has ups and downs. Sometime you do great, and sometimes you get by. People have ups and downs too. We need to be loyal to those who have been loyal to the company and be patient while they are sorting out their problems. It may seem expensive, but don’t consider it a cost, look at it as an investment. You will have a dedicated and loyal employee for years to come.

Remember, the secret ingredient of every recipe is Love. With love, making four course meals is as easy as pouring cereal in bowl. With reluctance, frying an egg will produce below par results.

So be bold. Don’t be concerned with your CEO grade as viewed by outsiders. Be concerned with how your employees grade you as a CEO. If your employees see you on their side, they will work side by side, with passion and love, ensuring your company’s success. After all, that’s the only CEO grade that counts.

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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When it comes to management, “Out of Control” is a compliment.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but the more you control, the less you will succeed. In other words, unless you let go, you won’t grow.

Especially in small business environments, there is a general feeling that if management does not keep it all in check, the business will fall apart.  For a moment, let’s assume that this theory is true. By this definition, the more management controls, the better work gets done. Expanding further, it then behooves us to give management control of everything to ensure it is done the best it can be done.  Now, we have just bound the growth of the company to the availability of management. Since the hours of the day are limited, the growth of the company is now limited.  Therein lies the fundamental flaw in “control by management”.

If management liberates itself from control it can then be free to think of larger plans. After all, presumably the reason you are in a management position is that you have experience. Experience can not only create competitive advantages, but it can also avoid costly mistakes.  In business, as in sports, wins often come from not making mistakes. Yet, when in the trenches, even the most experienced can make mistakes since they are not sufficiently removed from the process to clearly see the obstacles.  This is precisely why even the best players in the world have coaches.

Be a Coach, Not a Player

Throughout our business lives, we have all heard the advice: “delegate, delegate, delegate”. But often this great advice is shrugged off with “I wish I could”, “Don’t have the talent”, “We are under-resourced”, “It’s too risky at our size”, and similar rationalization.  Yet, the truth is that by delegation you will get more done with better quality, have a happier team, and the quality of your business and your business life will increase at least ten-fold.

Some are fortunate enough that they can afford great talent, therefore delegation seems like a no-brainer. However, delegation is an acquired skill for most. Those who don’t have it will try to micromanage even the best talent, rendering it virtually ineffective.

On the other hand, some may overcompensate for previous micromanagement and completely wash their hands off of the tasks at hand. That, in the words of my friend Allen Hargreaves, is abdication and not delegation.

Delegation is about letting the person closest to the problem solve the problem, and you, the management, being there in support of them, not to monitor them.  You have to be there, side-by-side and close enough to share your experience, but far enough that the work is done by the delegatee and they receive ALL the credit for it.

Developing Delegatees

A great psychiatrist friend of mine once told me that counseling is ineffective. It amounts to giving advice, in one ear and out the other. By contrast, with therapy, the psychiatrists often know the answers, but never share it with the patient. They just ask questions leading the patient down the path so they themselves can reach the right conclusions. That experience will never be forgotten, and thereafter, the patient will always take the right steps.

Management coaching should also be very similar to the therapy approach. Using this model, you can empower the best talent to be better. You can also take even the least experienced, and turn them into the most valuable team members.  This approach can allow you to hire out of college, and in no time compete very effectively with those who are paying much higher salaries.

Control has its place

As you may have seen in my other posts, patience is running thin in today’s work environment.  Impatient people are often short with others, especially with those that are in the learning phase, or simply did not see a problem the way others viewed it.

This is where control has its value.  Regardless of how frustrated, outraged, or peeved you are, you need to be in control of your emotions.  This is even more important for leaders who are coaching, teaching, and sharing their experience on a daily basis.

Remember the rule on controlling emotions: In any given exchange, regardless of the position one holds, the one who loses their temper has lost. The damage might seem temporary, but I can assure you it is not. People often don’t remember details of events, but they do remember how they felt at the event.  Therefore an event in which you have shown frustration – or worse yet, anger – will be forever be remembered in a negative light, diminishing your value as a leader or a team player.

Manage Processes Not People

In the 1930s, when talking about black empowerment, Marian Andreson was credited with a quote which truly applies to today’s business environment. She said:

“As long as you keep a person down,
some part of you has to be down there to hold him down,
so it means that you cannot soar as you otherwise might.”

So let go of controlling people today, and focus on creating processes, strategies, and competitive advantages. When you create processes, people can follow them with minimal guidance.  As a result, you get controlled quality without having to control people.

This is the formula for growth.  Let go, so you can grow.

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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The World we Live in:
The world is made of up two kinds of people: Those who are impatient and those who don’t know that they are!

Regardless of age, gender, education, or stature in society, it appears that we have transformed ourselves into busy worker bees enslaved to our impatience. This has affected every facet of our life encompassing our relationships, our parenting, the way we work and even to how we get our news.

When CNN is on, does the anchor, the ticker scrolling across the bottom of our screen, or the conversation we have on the phone, get our undivided attention? Do we get the subject in depth, or do we just grab the headline and assume the rest? NPR is one of the few remaining sources of “10 minutes” vs. “10 seconds” analysis. How many of us listen to NPR outside of our cars where we are captive audiences?  Those who have the time or inclination to read books or magazine articles vs. these quick multi-media flashes are quickly becoming the minority. When an issue arises that appears to have the public’s interest, the news repeats ad nauseam, with seemingly nothing new to offer as if the media’s idea of in-depth analysis is repeating the same headlines over and over. A quick look at what happened after Michael Jackson’s death makes that all too clear. Why is this happening? The media is trying to appeal to the impatient masses that prefer short burst of headlines as opposed to in depth analysis.

This has affected our culture in more ways than one, and some of the effects will be seen later, especially since the younger generations’ understanding (or lack there of) of world events and domestic issues is shallow and headline oriented.  This is not limited to children. The silent scared shriek of the intellectuals was heard across the world when it was announced that the then president Bush does not read newspapers.

It seems impossible to battle the tide of impatience taking over our lives. While there are some who are not aware of it, others who are watching the changes as if it was a movie, a few are looking at ways to harness it and perhaps even turn it into a business competitive advantage.

Understanding Impatience is the Secret Sauce
As you design products and offerings for sale to the public, you can bear in mind that the more “intuitive” the product, and the less the learning curve for using it, the more appealing it will be.  Just observe yourself the next time you get a new rental car. If you can’t figure out the stereo, the air conditioning, or how the seats adjust in a less than a minute, odds are, you will not have a favorable rating on that car.

Knowing this behavior pattern is a competitive advantage. The challenge is that we can’t keep offering the same old familiar products just to cater to impatience, since without innovation it is hard to sustain a client base.

Strike a balance between impatience and innovation:

• Let intuitiveness be your operative word: People often have patience when they can easily figure new things out on their own. In fact, an inherent self-satisfaction builds that translates to liking your product.
• Have consistency in your offering Once people have mastered one section of your product, they will just fly through the other sections, as they now consider themselves “experts” of how your product behaves.  Feeling an expertise on a product brings about a natural affinity, and product champions get born.
• Make your product attractive and interesting: Interest is the kryptonite of impatience. When people are interested in something, they apply themselves to it, time flies and impatience is nowhere to be found. Even lack of intuitiveness can be made up with this interest. Arguably iPod was not that intuitive at first, yet it was attractive and interesting so that all flocked to it, learned it and it took over the world.
• Cater your sales to the impatient: One can imagine that impatience wreaks havoc on long sales cycles.  If at all possible, devise ways to shorten the sales cycle, or use technology, online videos, and web-centric approaches for prospects to educate themselves on your products at the speed or timeline they are comfortable with.

Successful product designers are constantly balancing impatience, innovation, attractiveness and interest.  Take Facebook for example. Since its interaction grew organically, almost every first time visitor took a few minutes of clicking to figure out how to put Facebook to work for him or her. Not exactly what you would call intuitive. However, enough folks have used it now, that its menu and interaction system has become the model for many new products. Entrepreneurs would rather work with an unintuitive, yet popular interface than risk fighting users’ impatience. The fear is real. Even when Facebook improved their own interface, many lobbied to have them roll it back, since they did not have the patience of unlearning something they were used to. This behavior is, of course, much to the chagrin of user interface experts that fear bad habits can become the standard simply because people got used to it.

Dealing with impatience in your own business
Your team members are a part of the society, are not immune to impatience, and most likely display the same behavioral patterns discussed above.  At work, impatience often leads to multi-tasking. On one hand, it seems like a blessing as we all have a ton to do and multi-tasking appears to produce more results. On the other hand, perhaps not enough attention is given to each task to produce the right results.

This problem is substantially larger for small businesses. As opposed to big businesses where many people perform the same function, in small business, the same person performs many functions, and often they are the only one performing it. As a result, should that effort not be done most optimally, the business will suffer.

When performing tasks, strike a balance between multi-tasking and dedicated focus:

• Don’t try to do it all at once: Impatience just wants to just get it done with. So often people try to do all the work at once. Imagine if I handed you a stack of playing cards and asked you to rip them in half. If you are very strong, after exerting a ton of energy, you may be able to complete the task. However, if you ripped the cards one by one, you will have them all ripped in a New York minute.
• Establish Uninterruptible Quiet Hours: Have your team designate at least two hours per day, where they would turn off email, instant messenger, put their headphones on, and get deeply involved at the task at hand. When less interrupted, time will lose normal negative effect on your patience. It may seem at first that nobody can afford that, but the productivity you gain will make you a convert, wondering how you ever worked without it.
• Don’t fight the tide, do multitasking: Multi-tasking can get you ahead. People are used to it and feel good when they multi-task. So don’t avoid it, just harness it to your advantage. Multi-task for tasks that don’t require thinking. For instance, if you don’t have a system that automatically files emails in appropriate folders, as you are on the phone, you can do the filing.
• Use technology to automate the work that tests your patience: If at all possible, automate your processes that are repeated, leaving more time for innovative approaches. New processes spark the interest of the staff, and they will address them lovingly and patiently.
• Meetings so all have to pay attention: In collaborative efforts, communication is key. However, whether verbal or in emails, often communication happens correctly, however, for all the reasons mentioned here, the recipients do not pay enough attention to make it effective. Call 15-minute meetings. Any less than that may not get the message across, any more than that will have people’s mind wandering. People are capable of giving their undivided attention for 15 minutes and as a result, you will achieve your goal of making sure all are in sync.
  

Be conscious of the looming damage that impatience and lack of attention is bringing to your business. Devise ways to measure and/or control it, and you will clearly have a competitive advantage.

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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Unbeknownst to businesses, a storm may be looming right under their own roof, especially for small businesses where resources are constantly limited and reserves are low or non-existent. It is so easy to get distracted, inundated, or even derailed with worry.

However, speaking as a small business CEO, I got news for you: You can’t afford to worry.

Imagine yourself as the captain of a row-boat. You plot the right navigation course, check for the weather and plan for all that can be planned. Then you keep all your staff rowing in sync, encouraging and guiding them around every turn, always focused on reaching the target destination. You make the row-boat the best that it can be. However, throughout this journey, one fact remains: You control the row boat, but you don’t control the waves.

While it is understandable to be concerned, it is also important to not let the “worry” take over the business operation. Since you can’t control the waves, worrying about them will not have any positive outcome. Worry is negative energy with severe paralyzing effects (picture a deer in headlights).  It slows creativity down, locks you in status quo and reduces the possibility of new maneuvers, especially any move that remotely has any risk associated with it. Worry is physically draining and makes you feel helpless psychologically.

The fact is that in a bad economy, the economic waves are no longer carrying you. They are clashing with you head on, and this is exactly when you need to be nimble, try new routes, be stronger, work harder and smarter than you ever did, so you can overcome the environment. All of which are negated by worrying.

Make the environment work for you.
Viewed in the right light, every problem is an opportunity. In this environment, there are so many businesses that either due to their size, or lack of market awareness, are not able to make adjustments to their direction. Your agility and ability to adapt will be your competitive advantage. Plot a direction that employs the environment to work for you, not against you. As a first step, start your course correcting actions by itemizing your concerns and creating a list of what you can do better.
When times are tough, it is always good to revisit the basics. Itemize all your areas of concern and categorize them based on possible actions. Almost all of the items in your list will fall into one of the following categories. I have taken the liberty of defining an action for each:

Category	Your Actions
Items I have absolutely no control over	If possible, devise a workaround, otherwise, accept as a fact of life and adjust to its existence. This will become your worry-not list.
Items I have some control over, but may drain my resources	Do a quick analysis of whether the effort would be worth the reward. If so, implement a quick head-on plan to create a competitive advantage for yourself. Remember others may not be able to react as quickly as you.
Items I have control over	This is where you will focus the most. Divide into: It is necessary to continue as is, and no correction needed. The famous “If it ain’t broken don’t fix it” approach. May be able to improve our approach and execution. A unique opportunity to beat status quo and create a new approach. I MUST change, otherwise, I will have a head on crash.

By putting aside items in your worry-not list, you now have more focus, more time and more energy to dedicate to the items you can control. Prioritize these items and work on them in order of priority. Employ all the possible tools at your service to execute those as efficiently and cost effectively as possible. The previous blog posts discuss team building, automation and other ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs at the same time; you may want to visit them.

Remember, every hour you delay on making this economy work for you, is an hour of lost business opportunity and squandered competitive advantage.

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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Today, many small businesses are caught in the middle of a situation that is governed by macroeconomics and broader market issues, and as such, there is very little control or correction they can apply to the business environment.

On one hand, due to the economy, clients are not capable of absorbing higher prices and are always under pressure to reduce their costs of goods and services, which in turn puts pressure on revenues, forcing revenue to grow at a slower pace, and in the case of many companies, even flatten or decrease.

One the other hand, companies’ operational costs have increased dramatically across the board, while inflation continues, unchecked, despite the recessionary climate. In addition, some cost items, such as existing employee salaries do not float with the recessionary curve and only have upward pressures. In other words, as companies make less revenue, they can’t in turn offer lower salaries. Salaries remain fixed and only grow for typical employees.

As a whole, it often takes several months, and often years, for inflation to adjust correctly to reflect market conditions.  Therefore a typical business owner feels the effects of inflation when it comes to the costs, but feels the effects of recession when it comes to revenue and income.

The Economic squeeze occurs where your growth in revenue/profit is at a much slower curve than the growth in your fixed and variable costs. In other words, a typical business owner is paying higher prices while making less revenue.

The Way Out

Small Businesses have to constantly be in control of the balance between income and expenditures, especially in an economic downturn. I liken expenditures (and debt) to gaining weight. It is so easy to gain weight, yet it is so hard to shed old habits and lose the pounds. Every successful weight program calls for a “healthy lifestyle change” as opposed to a quick fad diet, so that the effects can be long-lasting.

The same applies to small businesses. Look for healthy lifestyle changes as opposed to rash or quick actions. For instance, empowering people to increase their efficiency is a great start to a “healthy lifestyle change”.  By comparison, an unhealthy change, for instance, would be a massive reduction in force (RIF) which often has the side effect of forcing talented employees to search for new jobs to battle uncertainty. Such companies, often shortly after the RIF, hire new staff and have to once again invest in the employee learning curve. This arguably is not the best approach.

And similar to a weight loss program, the biggest nemesis is change. Those who fear change and continue with business as usual are doomed to having the road being their driver and will have little control in deciding their own destiny.

We have dedicated our company to developing Software as a Service that both reduces costs and increases efficiencies; however, this advice is not limited to our solution. In any industry, there are ways to remove extraneous costs and increase efficiencies.

It Takes a Team to Implement A Success Plan: Your Team

A “healthy lifestyle change” is the only way out of the “Economic Squeeze”.  Companies who consciously try healthy lifestyles have a definite competitive advantage over others. However, the change has to be embraced, bought in, adopted and grokked by the entire team.

Every small business owner today has eyes on two goals:

• Increase Recurring Revenue
• Decrease Recurring Costs

Discuss these ideas with employees and ensure that these are their goals as well. Ask them for ways to improve the efficiency in their area of work.  Look for automated solutions.

Share every success, every loss, run an open company with no secrets, and your employees will take ownership. If your employees are more “members of the team” than typical employees, you are already ahead of the curve. However, continue down this path, surround yourself by smart people and listen to them. Ways to improve operations, and approaches to reducing costs are often more apparent to those closest to the problem, the staff!

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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Define Processes and Automate
Running a small business is like being chased by a pack of wild animals. Every one step you fail to take, they gain two steps on you. If you stop, you will be devoured. You must constantly be ahead of the pack and make every effort to increase your distance. You ask how?

Stretch your Resources
Small businesses are notorious for never having enough resources. If you don’t have enough of something, it behooves you to use what you do have wisely and appropriately. The best way to do so is to have well-defined processes. Take the guessing game away from your resources. Once proven, processes can be repeated over and over flawlessly.

In every process, you are asking your team to get to a destination. Imagine that instead of them looking around to find their way, you create a railroad track for them. Once aboard, they can go as fast as they can to get to the results without thinking of which way to turn at each cross-section. As you add new team members, they will also follow the track.

It may seem counter intuitive at first, since defining and debugging processes is somewhat time-consuming. However, if a process is to be done over a mere two or three times, you will save enough to make the original investment worthwhile. As a side benefit, you not only save now, but also facilitate smooth growth in your company, something that many small businesses struggle with.

Make fewer mistakes
Sounds easier said than done? Well, it is easier than you think. At InfoStreet, we have a saying that “Only 10% of our employees are human, for the rest we employ technology”.  When you define processes and if you automate them, they get done accurately, on-budget and on-time, every time.

Look at your company and see what can be automated. The conventional wisdom that most things cannot be automated is wrong. If you interviewed 100 people twenty years ago, 99 of them would say, you may be able to automate some things, but you can’t automate sales. Well, E-commerce proved them wrong. Same goes for supply chain, workflow, ….

Send an email to your team. Ask them what actions they repeat over and over in a given month. You would be surprised as to the gems you will uncover. Take those responses, sort them by priority and automate one by one.

By automating, you will make less mistakes, your team would be happier not having to deal with repetitive grunt work and all will win.

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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A Company is a Team.
If you don’t have a team, one that employees feel a part of, I got news for you: You don’t have a business, you just have a burden on your shoulders. The company will only run on your stamina, and the moment you run out of steam, well, so does your company. The team is so critical to the success of any business, that I am dedicating this entire Post to it.

Clarity is Priceless!
You run the business, you have the vision, and you know what it is that you need at every step of the venture, yet there are times that the task at hand is fuzzy. If the picture is not clear to you, it certainly won’t make sense for your team members who are looking to you for leadership. Be ultra clear on what you expect. A well-defined complicated task will be better executed than an unclear simple task.

Be Brave – Admit your mistakes
Traditionally, there has been a need for a leader to always be right. If leaders made a mistake, they would not admit it in fear that they would no longer be looked up to. Simply put, this tradition is passe. Your willingness to admit wrong will allow your team to openly bring the flaws of your plan to your attention without the fear of persecution. After all, that’s what the team is there for, to help you succeed. Admit your mistakes, it is the ultimate win-win.

Run an Open Company
Office politics is a disease that cuts right into any company’s productivity. One of the most effective methods of eliminating it, is running an open company. There is nothing worse than a half heard conversation. The issue is that people often assume the worst for the other half that they did not hear. So in the tradition of clarity being priceless and building a team, share everything with your employees. We at InfoStreet share everything except individual remuneration, since most people like that piece to be kept private.

The 3Gs
When you hire employees, you should hire those that you feel will be a part of your team for 3 or more years. Employees that have a short stint with you get trained by you but will take the first job that pays a tad better. To battle this, I have come up with a motto which I religiously follow:

The satisfaction of an employee is governed by 3 Gs:

Green	How much you pay them.
Growth	How much they learn and experience while a part of your team.
Glory	How much personal satisfaction and credit they receive working for your company.

Provide a decent pay. Not a low pay, not the highest on the block either; Give your employees the chance to express themselves; Encourage them to grow personally and help you grow; Give them the credit for the success and you will create a pleasant, healthy environment; And that is the number one requirement for success!

© Copyright 2006-2010, Siamak Farah, All Rights Reserved.

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