After Ben Allen founded Allen Technology Advising (ATA), he struggled to find work-life balance. “After starting ATA it was really painful for me as a business owner,” he told us, “If I went on vacation I was always on edge, I had to leave my phone on.”

His situation will be familiar to most business owners — after all, we found that 63% of business owners work 50+ hours a week.

Allen wanted to increase the value of his business, while still finding time for himself. How would he eventually achieve that?

With this formula:

Personal Vision + A Bucket List = Increased Company Value!

Personal Vision

The first part of the formula is your personal vision. Have you revisited it lately? Are you working on those areas that will have big picture impact on your company, or are you mired in the lower value operational details that should be delegated?

Allen’s personal vision was to build a company that didn’t rely on him, so he could spend time pursuing other passions, like travel.

What is your personal vision for your company? Look at work role and time involvement, material desires, non-material values and intellectual rewards, retirement and business exit strategy.

Bucket List

The second part of the formula is your “bucket list.” A few years ago a TAB Member announced in his board meeting that he wanted to get a tattoo. He had just seen the movie “The Bucket List” about two men, both with an incurable illness, who meet in the hospital and decide to embark on a journey together to complete all of the things they want to do before they “kick the bucket.”

At the top of Allen’s bucket list was to take his family for an extended sabbatical in Tanzania, a country he had fallen in love with while traveling there.

Have you put together a bucket list? What is at the top? When would you need to start checking things off the list in order to get everything done?

Increased Company Value

How do having a personal vision and bucket list increase your company value? Because they help free you from your business’ day-to-day operations. After all, the more you work in your business, the less it is worth when it’s time to sell.

Imagine showing a prospective buyer around your business. You explain that this person is in charge of sales and production, this one in charge of HR and accounting, etc. When asked what you do, you explain that you have developed processes and procedures that allow the company to run as you want it without your direct involvement, enabling you to take lots of time off.

If you are working 6-7 days a week you do not have a business — you have a job. To a prospective buyer, what would be worth more?

“I really did have a belief as the business owner that I was supposed to know everything and be great at everything,” Allen said. “What I’ve learned is that one of my best skills is cultivating great staff.”

Because of the staff he’d cultivated, Allen was able to build a business that could run without him at the helm. That allowed him to realize his personal vision — and his bucket list goal — of taking a seven-month sabbatical with his family to Tanzania.

Five years previously, his company may have come to a grinding halt. But because Allen had built his business around his personal vision and bucket list, it did the exact opposite: While away, his company posted the largest profit month in its history, while clients raved about the improved customer service.

To increase the value of your company, take the time to work on your personal vision and your bucket list. Share it with someone to hold you accountable, then get working on checking items off!

Looking for more ways to increase the value of your business? Check out our weekly sales training meetings!

The world of commerce has changed dramatically in the past few years. Technological, demographic, social and economic changes are raining over small businesses in a never-ending series of squalls. With the advance of social networks, smartphones and instant communications technologies, traditional, one-way “tell and sell” messages laden with clichés and jargon don’t deliver ROI.

Today’s audiences require real dialogue, a demonstrated value proposition and a say in how they interact with your product or service. They form their own opinions and “customize” their own worlds.

They demand to know “What’s in it for me?” before they actively “like” your company.

Enabling your business to court this new engaged customer requires you to build a sales and marketing platform that:

•  Builds real relationships through real dialogue with engagement marketing: Whether face-to-face or online, this dialogue must be genuine and must be sustained over time.
• Listens instead of speaks: Your customers are telling you important information by their actions and responses. Ask: Do we have a compelling value proposition? How relevant is the story we are telling? Does it matter to our prospects? Then adapt your message based on feedback.
• Simplifies interactions: Don’t make it complicated to interact with your company or to use your products. Be aware of how your customers want to interact and meet them there.

As Peter Drucker once said, “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Doing so is hard — if it wasn’t, everyone would be doing it.

You can make selling easier by tightening your focus, simplifying your approach and creating dialogues that address your customers’ real needs with engagement marketing.

“I’m a big believer in the adage ‘it’s better to give than receive.’ When I meet someone new, I try to find out about them and really listen to what their issues are.”

— Glenn Franklin, TAB Member and partner at Franklin, Gringer & Cohen

If you need someone to listen to your business’s issues, consider joining On The Bus! Find out if membership is right for you and your business.

“There are graveyards full of people who thought they were indispensable.”

— Karl Siebrecht, TAB Member and Manager of 35 Left Studios

If you have trouble delegating, you’re not alone. Most business owners say delegating administrative tasks is something they need to work on as a business owner.

One reason delegation is important is that it saves you time. But another big reason is that it builds trust within the organization.

How? When your employees and managers understand that you trust them with responsibilities, they will respond in kind. Employees have skills, they have opinions, they have ideas and they want to use them. When you delegate responsibility to an employee, you are telling that person: “I trust you.” Most will step up to the challenge, and when they deliver it will deepen the bond of trust between you.

Yet many business owners fail to foster a culture of trust with their employees by refusing to delegate — maybe out of a desire to maintain control or out of impatience. Building trust through delegating, on the other hand, requires ongoing diligence. And it is certainly worth the effort.

Don’t confuse delegating tasks with delegating responsibility. What’s the difference? When a task is done, the process stops until the next task is assigned. Responsibility, on the other hand, never ends.

Picking up tools, sweeping floors and taking out the trash are all tasks. Maintaining a safe work environment, on the other hand, is a responsibility. When you habitually assign and emphasize responsibilities, the tasks take care of themselves.

One place business owners often slip up when delegating responsibilities is being unwilling to empower employees to make decisions related to those responsibilities. Yet employees won’t feel fully trusted until they have that empowerment.

Start by understanding why an employee makes a certain decision, which will help you understand their thought processes and learn to trust their judgment. When your trust of their decisions becomes practice, they will be empowered to act more quickly, and your company will grow much faster.

Build a culture of trust by delegating responsibility and empowering employees to make decisions. Remember, you can’t grow the company by yourself.

“Delegation not only frees me up to do more strategic and important things, it makes me that much more available to my clients. I can respond from anywhere at any time. I have worked hard to develop and maintain the attitude that I need not be “in my office” to do what I do. Once you accomplish successful delegation, you too can benefit from this freeing yet effective mindset.”

— Anson Ross Thompson, CEO of The Thompson Group

Learn more about building a strong culture of trust by contacting us at (973) 540-0444.

Sales is the backbone of your business’ profits — but do you really understand the ROI on your sales team?

Let’s say that your investment in a salesperson is $80,000 per year (about $41 per hour, based on 250 eight-hour work days per year). Let’s also say that this sales rep produces approximately $1 million in gross revenue. That means your rep is producing $500 per hour for you — not bad for a $41 per hour investment!

Now it gets interesting: What if you could grow your ROI by 30-40% or more?

The book The Weekly Coaching Conversation by Brian Souza contains a simple math equation:

Employee Productivity = Efficiency x Effort x Effectiveness

Let’s look at how to improve these three areas.

Sales efficiency

Increase the efficiency of your sales team by providing tools and systems to help them see more customers and sell more products. Coach them to implement more efficient sales call practices and on the value of pre-call planning based on notes from past sales calls. Taking the time to prepare for each sales call is more efficient than shooting from the hip or hoping to walk into a deal.

Sales effort

Look for methods to decrease the effort required by your team to complete mundane and time-consuming tasks. Make it easy for them to have more time with customers and prospects. Minimize reports, outsource time-wasting tasks and allow your reps to focus on selling. Coach your team to find ways to increase their efforts on revenue producing (selling) activities.

Sales effectiveness

Increase the effectiveness of sales calls by leading your team as a coach, not forcing them like a manager. Provide training and incentives to keep everyone performing at peak levels of effectiveness when they are with your clients or prospects.

Even adding one additional sales call per day can equate to about a 35% increase in selling activity — or 250 additional sales calls per year. And that will lead to increased revenue and growth for your business.

How can you improve each of these three areas today?

On The Bus can offer even more ideas on maximizing your sales investment. Find out if On The Bus Membership is right for you!

Benjamin Disraeli once said, “Change is constant,” and that’s never been truer in business than it is today. Hyper-fast technological advancement, “free agent” employees, churning regulations and laws — for business owners operating in our current environment, managing change is one of their most important jobs.

Managing change in a business is part art, part science. First, business owners need to accept it as inevitable. Second, employees must recognize that each day brings change and new challenges.

To thrive in today’s world, a company needs a strong culture that reflects an understanding and knowledge of the potential for change. Companies that embrace change — and look for powerful new ways to innovate — will prosper.

So how can you prepare for — and even encourage — change?

The first step is to identify predictable changes and adopt contingency or change management plans that reflect the coming adjustments. Don’t wait for change to come to you — be prepared to meet it head-on.

Stay current on changes and trends in your industry by tapping into the expertise and knowledge of other business owners. Do this by building your network<http://www.thealternativeboard.com/toolbox/business-owner-network/>, seeking outside counsel or joining associations that offer knowledge, guidance and a fresh perspective.

Consider change as a positive thing for your business — an opportunity for revolutionary (or evolutionary) growth. Rather than simply reacting, aim to shape changes in your industry by encouraging your out-of-the-box thinking and innovation in your company culture.

Change is coming. Are you ready to make the most of it?

Find out about the current state of your company culture and hear advice from other owners on making it stronger. Contact us today at (973) 540-0444.