A recent post in the NY Times entitled “The Secret To Having Happy Employees” got me thinking about the relationship between happy staff members and happy customers or more significantly, unhappy staff and unhappy customers. In my mind, client satisfaction is clearly tied to employee satisfaction.

In the post, Jay Goltz talks about the two keys to happy employees: Treating them well and firing the unhappy ones. Now that may seem somewhat extreme, but as Jay said, what he really meant were people who were “…disrespectful (to others, not me), incompetent, unreasonable, undependable, irresponsible, unproductive, dysfunctional, …angry, whiny or mean”, and I would agree.

If a small firm or business treats their staff well and people are still unhappy, they’re probably not a good fit, and like a bad apple…well you know the rest.

It all comes back to the culture of your firm. Cultures that treat their staff members well are more likely to treat their customers well and vice-versa. But more importantly, when a firm values their staff, it’s natural for the staff to be more invested in the success of the company. When that happens, staff then attaches greater value to the customers that are the life-blood of the company and to their colleagues As a result, client satisfaction becomes more than just company policy, it becomes a priority for each staff member as well.

Looking at the situation in reverse; when management doesn’t treat staff well, they don’t feel valued. Little gripes become big complaints. Motivation wanes. Bad attitudes become contagious and people lose interest in doing a good job. This naturally impacts how they treat customers.

If you want to ensure client satisfaction, treat your staff well, build a culture that supports motivation from within, and make sure that you make employee satisfaction your first priority.

Susan Martin, Business Leadership Coaching

There’s no doubt about it, a well written case study can bring the benefits of a service, product or idea to life. As a huge believer in the case study as a marketing strategy, I’m always on the lookout for a great case study, and I found one this morning in today’s NY Times that I’d like to share with you.

Jack Stack writes a blog called “Open the Books”, which is part of the small business blog “You’re The Boss“. According to his bio “Jack Stack is the founder and chief executive of SRC Holdings, a manufacturing company that pioneered open-book management and has spawned 58 companies since 1982.”

In my opinion, open-books management is a terrific way to increase profitability and grow a better business all around. But to many business owners, the idea of opening their books and letting employees see what’s really going on, is a bit scary and hard to swallow.

Jack presented a most compelling case study for open-books management today. He illustrates how his company selects what they call a “critical number” to improve upon each year. A critical number is an area that they’re doing poorly in compared to the competition. They then tie everyone’s performance in this area to their bonus, and give them a portion of that bonus on a quarterly basis as their demonstrating positive efforts towards it and getting results, so that employees can stay focused on these improvements and efforts throughout the year, and the company can reap the benefits consistently rather than depending upon end of year efforts to earn them.

If you’ve heard about the benefits of open-books management, but find the concept a little scary, worrisome or intimidating, I would suggest you read Jack’s case study and see if you agree that open-books management might be an effective strategy to help your company build their business.

Susan Martin, Business Coaching

I’ve written a lot about the importance of building trust when marketing your business. Today I want to talk about a branch of our government that’s destroying trust that the public has in organic foods.

Close to 20 years ago my husband and I decided to “go organic” because we felt that we didn’t want to put anything in our bodies that was tainted with pesticides, antibiotics or other chemicals. We read about organic farming, and the standards that had been developed internally within the organic farming industry and felt that we could put our trust in the standards that they developed. Unfortunately, since the USDA has taken over organic certification, they have been slowing destroying trust.

And they are destroying trust in numerous ways. As large corporations such as General Mills have bought smaller organic producers, the advisory boards that are supposed to act as watchdogs for the USDA organic program have become populated with representatives of the very corporations they are supposed to be watching over. In a article on Culinary.com, author Nancy Schatz Alton writes:

“Over the past several years, numerous small- and medium-sized organic producers have been folded into larger corporations. More than half of the 20 top multinational food manufacturers have acquired organic brands. Even the current NOSB reflects this corporate turn in organics. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture, the board’s 15 members include representatives from categories including farmer/grower; handler/processor; retailer; consumer/public interest; environmentalist; scientist; and certifying agent. Previously, the board was more representative of small farmers and interests outside of the corporate sector…”

“Former NOSB board member Jim Riddle notes that all three consumer seats are now filled with people representing corporations. “It’s a balance that’s out of whack,” says Riddle. “Traditionally, the scientist seat has gone to a scientist from a university. Now it is a corporate scientist from General Mills. She is a nice person and has a Ph.D., but it is not impartial science.”

Not surprising that special interest groups have now taken the place of impartial experts who are supposed to be protecting our food sources, thus destroying trust that had been built up over the years prior to USDA involvement.

Nancy continues:

“In her book What to Eat, Marion Nestle writes, “As for attempts to weaken the rules, think ‘relentless.’ Political appointees at the USDA are always looking for loopholes that might favor conventional growers.” The USDA runs the NOP while continuing to follow its main mandate from Congress, which is to promote conventional agriculture, writes Nestle. The dichotomy between these two programs is clear.”

When the US government decided to take over the organic standards some years ago, there was a huge uproar in the organic community, fearing that the standards would be lowered. According to the USDA, one of those standards is the right for people to be able to buy and consume food that is free of “genetically modified materials”.

Now, the organic food chain is faced with another very real threat. Secretary Vilsack of the USDA, who pledged to represent the “eater”, not just the farming industry, wants to allow genetically engineered alfalfa seeds into the US market despite as a petition from Food Democracy states “…the USDA’s acknowledged risk of genetic contamination to conventional and organic alfalfa,” thus destroying trust in the safety of organic foods.

If the future of clean organic foods is of any interest to you or your family, please join me by signing the petition below:

“Dear Secretary Vilsack,

As an American citizen who cares about how our nation’s food is grown and produced, I was shocked to read about the USDA’s recent draft environmental impact statement (EIS) that would allow genetically modified alfalfa to enter the U.S. market, despite the USDA’s acknowledged risk of genetic contamination to conventional and organic alfalfa.

I am writing in regard to draft EIS (APHIS-2007-0044) to ask that you reject Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa and to reconsider several of the misleading statements found in the USDA’s draft EIS. Since freedom from genetically modified materials is a central tenet to complying with the Organic Standards, failure to reject GMO alfalfa will make the Obama / Vilsack USDA a willing accomplice in the destruction of the organic sector.

As the USDA EIS readily admits, such contamination will cause significant economic harm to small conventional and organic family farmers, not only forcing many of them out of business, but further increasing farm size and consolidating agriculture into the hands of fewer individuals. Hopefully, this is neither a goal of the USDA nor of this current administration or an unintended consequence of any of its policies.

In addition, the implication that U.S. consumers do not care about genetic contamination of organic food shows that the Obama administration is not only out of touch with the American people, but demonstrates how little they understand the fastest growing and most profitable sectors of agriculture today.

As a consumer of organic foods, I care deeply about the integrity of the products that I buy. Not only does organic food production offer better protection for the environment and produce foods that are higher in nutritional density, but it also offers a better economic return for family farmers who have set the highest standard for agricultural production.

It is my hope, that as a Secretary of Agriculture that promised he would represent “eaters” as well as farmers, that you would reject GMO alfalfa so that you can do both.

Sincerely

[Your Name]

Please help in making it clear to the USDA that destroying trust in organics is not acceptable.

Susan Martin, Business Sanity

Amanda runs a small graphic design firm in Atlanta. She is the head designer and does most of the sales, works hard to keep her clients happy and does invoicing, customer service as well as trying to balance the books and keep projects on track.

Amanda started the firm about 8 years ago, and worked on her own for the first three. As her business grew, she realized she needed help, and now has four employees; all with varying degrees of design and administrative experience.

When we first spoke last summer, Amanda was on overload. Although she struggled to make payroll each week, Amanda still felt she was doing the lion’s share of the work. She was in dire need of some good old fashioned delegation skills.

Amanda admitted to adding staff by grabbing “smart and capable” people when she the workload became too overwhelming. Because she had no hiring strategy and was short on delegation skills, merely adding personnel didn’t get her very far.

Here’s what we did:

1. We looked at Amanda’s long term goals. She dreamed of retiring to the Carolina coast by the time she was 60, in less than 10 years. In order to do that, she needed to pay off her business debts, increase revenues and profits and put 15k per year into her retirement and savings accounts once the debt was paid off.

2. We focused on her strengths and which aspects of the work she most enjoyed. Amanda was very creative and loved coming up with the big picture design concepts. She loved dealing with clients and they adored her. She was a natural born sales person for her own work. Amanda wasn’t as in tune with finances, hated dealing with minutia and paperwork, and uncomfortable with delegation; skills that she felt were important to running her business effectively.

3. We identified the values that were most important to her. Quality and integrity were two of her guiding principals. She was passionate about good design and had built her reputation on it.

4. We listed the myriad of different tasks and responsibilities that were involved in running the business, and sorted them by category: creative, technical design, sales, customer service, financial and administrative. When sharpening delegation skills, it’s critical to understand what you’re delegating.

5. We determined what Amanda wanted to keep doing and what she was willing to part with. She realized that her forte was design direction and sales. It took a while, but she finally agreed to delegate the rest to others who had the appropriate skills another key step to sharpening her delegation skills.

6. We created job descriptions for each area so she would know what each employee would be responsible for, and how to judge if they were appropriate for the job.

7. We took a hard look at the skills and experience of her current employees, and compared their strengths and weaknesses with the job descriptions. Although the process made her a little uneasy, Amanda was pleased when she realized that John was well suited for the technical designer role. Whew – she could keep him on without hesitation. Instead of using him as a jack of all trades, she could have him focus on what he does best.

Another designer, Nancy, was a bit flighty and not good with administrative tasks, dealing with clients or finances. Amanda liked Nancy, but realized that there was no place for her at the firm. Amanda had no choice but to let her go.

Marion was great at paperwork, work-flow and organizing, and not as strong a designer. She was still in school, and readily agreed to stay on part time in an administrative role.

No one on staff was interested or capable of doing the bookkeeping. It was a task that had been passed around the office, leaving a trail of unpaid bills, bounced checks and late billing. With newly honed delegation skills, Amanda readily agreed to speak with a bookkeeping service that many of my clients use.

Amanda was quite pleased with the results. She has reduced her staff to 2 full time and one part time employee and pays a bookkeeping service to come in once a month for net savings of $300 / week. Amanda has developed the delegation skills she needs to manage her small firm effectively. She understands where to focus her and her staff’s efforts and time. Most importantly, work is getting done expeditiously and Amanda no longer feels as if she has to do everything herself.

Do you have to do it all yourself?

Susan Martin, Business Leadership Coaching

As I write this post, our government is engaged in a somewhat historic event, a bipartisan meeting on health care reform meant to, as President Obama said “focus not just on where we differ but focus on where we agree.” (It’s streaming live today on the NYTimes.com) A number of important issues are being discussed – health insurance reform, health care costs, extending insurance and deficit reduction. Although I suppose as critics have said, that this could turn into a circus, I applaud the effort to try to find some common ground and get away from the talking points and political rhetoric to try to get something actually accomplished. My foremost concern, of course is how this will impact small business health insurance.

I’m particularly interested in how it will affect very small businesses, the one or two person firms and the self employed. Those individuals and small firms that have taken the initiative to create a living for themselves, and pay the highest premiums because they don’t qualify for larger costs effective group coverage. I believe that it’s high time that something is done to make it more affordable even for those who have the courage to work for and by themselves.

Perhaps this is a bit naive, but I’m hopeful that this step will result in some constructive dialogue to find out where the parties agree, so at least they can move forward on things they do, and figure out what to do with what they don’t. Hopefully within this new dialogue there will be some room to help bridge the self employed health insurance gap.

Your thoughts?

Susan Martin, Business Coaching

When developing websites for attorneys, following a few simple rules that can make all the difference between generic gobbledygook and compelling content which drives qualified prospective clients to your door.

Unfortunately, many websites for attorneys miss the mark because they fail to show what makes their firm different and better than the competition.

Using generic images, repetitive copycat text with no substance, and keyword stuffing undermines your firm’s reputation, fails to give visitors a reason to continue reading and results in high bounce rates and low conversions.

If you want to tweak an existing attorney site, or develop a new one that will bring in business, start by following these simple steps:

1. Start by developing a marketing message that clearly outlines the type of clients and cases you do your best work for, what the problems or issues are that you can help them to resolve, the benefits or results you get for your clients and what makes your firm different and better than the competition. When visitors come to your website this message should read loud and clear.

2. Develop separate pages for each of your main practice areas, with compelling copy that specifically describes the problems your clients experience, the solutions you provide and the benefits and results they will get as a result of working with your firm. The goal is to make your visitors understand that you know EXACTLY what they are going through.

3. Optimize for keywords around your copy, but don’t stuff too many into the text. It should flow naturally, not sound contrived.

4. Develop relevant title, description and keyword tags around your copy.

5. And make sure to invite visitors to contact you on each and every page.

When developing websites for attorneys, no BS is needed. Just compelling, specific, original content, based on your marketing message which lets visitors know very specifically that you can help them.

Susan Martin, Lawyer Marketing

The A.R.C. program’s small business stabilization program that is administered by the S.B.A. has been criticized by many due to a slim profit margin for the banks, and the large amount of effort required on the part of the banks and the borrowers; so many larger banks have completely shied away from the program.

According to an article in today’s NY Times by Robb Mandelbaum, several small banks are making noise because they’ve decided to embrace the program and make it work. Robb writes:

“…The top three A.R.C. lenders are Chase, Wells Fargo, and SunTrust. But the fourth biggest is Zions First National Bank, a Western regional bank based in Salt Lake City, which made the country’s first A.R.C. loan back in June…And the No. 5 purveyor? Tiny Peoples Bank of Mississippi has made 145 loans. A community bank based in Mendenhall (population 2,553), Peoples has five locations in four towns in the middle of the state. It had but $192 million in assets at the end of September, according to data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; that makes it the 3,342nd largest institution operating in the United States (out of 8,109)…

…Peoples isn’t even an especially large lender of regular S.B.A. loans, though it is prolific for its size. In 2009, Peoples approved $8.2 million worth of loans and ranked 187th among S.B.A. banks, in the top 10 percent.

So what gives? Why is Peoples Bank of Mississippi an A.R.C. powerhouse? The Agenda put that question to the president of Peoples, Dennis Ammann. “We just thought it was a great program,” he said, “that would help businesses survive during this recession. Or it was just a really good service for those customers that needed a little cash-flow help during the tough times.”

The program, Mr. Ammann acknowledged, is “a lot of work.” Sometimes, he said, it can take up to a month to process a loan. Moreover, the bank absorbs the costs of securing collateral that some other banks pass on to their borrowers. “I think we probably lose money on the front end on these things,” Mr. Ammann said. “Over time, we feel like this is building our relationship with this small business, and if they survive and grow, they’ll remember that we got them into this program early on. If our customers do well, we’re going to do well over time.”…”

A community bank with a focus on supporting and building relationships with small businesses – now that’s something I can get excited about!

Susan Martin, Business Coaching

A787J2FGDDFR

Just a quick post to tell you about Time Traveler Tours, a new blog written by my friend and expatriate Sarah Towle. The idea started when she happened upon an American father and his two boys on the right bank of the Seine. Evidently the kids weren’t quite as enthusiastic as Dad was about French history, but fortunately for them, Sarah came along and quickly caught their interest with her tales of the revolutionary war, prisons, guillotines and the kings policemen.

Sarah writes: “Journey though the ages to the world’s most popular destinations with self-guided interactive itineraries narrated by history’s most colorful characters…

-Tramp the gardens of the Chateau de Versailles with the Ancien Regime’s last Botanist-to-the-King;
– Experience the French Revolution and Reign of Terror through the eyes of murderess Charlotte Corday
– Or, lay to rest the centuries-old bones of Paris’ dead with the gravedigger who helped to make Napoleon’s Catacombs and Cemeteries

and more…

…High-context, self-guided, interactive historical itineraries for youth delivered through formats they enjoy and understand.” Time Traveler Tours, check it out!

Susan Martin

Came across an article by Scott Shane this morning on Small Business Trends that cites a survey conducted by Discover Small Business Services which concluded that temporary cash flow is still declining for small businesses. But I wonder, is this fact or just a perception?

Scott writes: “…The figure plots the percentage of respondents to the Discover Small Business Watch monthly survey of a random sample of 750 small business owners who answered “yes,” they are experiencing temporary cash flow issues…”

Not that I think that everything is rosy for small businesses, far from it, but are small businesses confusing lack of credit with a real difference in cash flow? Are they reacting to shrinking lines of credit or slower receivables? Does it reflect an increase in orders that have to be filled with less working capital? Do they see their cash reserves being stretched over a longer period of time, or is it really just that profitability has decreased and they now need additional capital to fund new business?

What’s been your experience?

Susan Martin, Small Business Financial Management