Let It Be

Your company’s leaders are responsible for managing and directing others. Their success can have a tremendous impact on profitability. This article will provide information about developing leaders for mid-size businesses and how you can create a team of effective managers who can get the job done. Whether you’re an executive, manager or team leader, the following information will be beneficial to you.

Mid-size business leadership development solutions will help your leaders become more effective in their roles.

Improving the leadership and management skills of managers within an organization is becoming increasingly important. Managers who are able to perform their jobs better and work toward the goals of the organization can improve productivity with fewer “people problems,” increased employee retention and greater profits.

Mid-size business solutions for improving and developing leaders from Profiles International combine the process of evaluating powerful organizational information with a personalized leadership development system to help managers improve the critical leadership skills that are most needed by your organization.

Mid-size business solutions help managers quickly become more effective. The approach is based on two elements:

1. Help managers understand and develop their own leadership competencies.
2. Provide useful insight to managers about the employees they manage, along with specific coaching advice on how to develop the employee and increase their productivity.

Improving and developing leaders starts by collecting input from several sources in the manager’s work environment to provide a truly honest assessment of how their performance is viewed by a variety of constituents. Combining direct feedback from direct reports, peers, supervisors, as well as customers, creates a personalized program for developing specific leadership skills based on that feedback. By starting from the real experiences of the people around the leader you can identify and capture both the leader’s strengths as well as areas that require development.

Mid-size business solutions for improving and developing leaders address specific leadership skills identified as requiring improvement, enabling managers to pursue self-improvement in the areas most essential to improving their job performance.

Mid-size business solutions provide you with objective, quantifiable data about individual managers so that you can make the best possible decisions. Leadership development solutions will help you identify managers who need improvement, the areas in which they need further development and the progress they have made toward improving the necessary skills.

Additionally, leadership development solutions for mid-size businesses give managers critical insight about the employees they manage, including measuring employees’ attitudes, motivations and beliefs toward their employers, current managers and job functions. This is a critical first-step toward building a high-performance workforce and improving the engagement levels within your organization.

Mid-size business owners need reliable tools that provide information and insights about how to be successful by doing the right things, the right way. It is impossible to know that right way without having the right information and a customized roadmap to get you there.

Your employees are the most valuable asset in your company. Keeping them engaged and motivated is the key to improving employee performance and a successful, highly productive business. While some employees produce to their highest capability regardless of the incentive, others need an occasional jump-start. When handled effectively, the result can be greater productivity and increased employee morale. This leads to greater job satisfaction and improved morale because your business is staffed with people who are highly productive, skilled and committed to doing their very best.

Formulating Your Business Direction

As you go through the process of choosing a niche for your business, you also need to start thinking about what your business will look like. There are many different ways you can go about this, but you really need to start with your own limitations and work from there.

For example, if you’re going to be consulting or coaching part time, you need to identify, realistically, how many hours per week you can invest in your business. Keep in mind that you’re not just talking about the number of hours you actually spend coaching, but how much time you can invest in things like sales, marketing and other tasks.

Next, you should think about how you want to see your clients. Do you want to interact with clients in person, on the phone, or via some other medium? Working with clients individually, in person, allows you to charge a premium rate. This will also require a lot of time and energy.

You should try, at this stage, to identify opportunities for group consulting, as well. This could take the form of in-person seminars, conference calls or even webinars. Group consulting lets you offer some personalized attention to your clients while maximizing your profits.

A product-sales model is another option for your business. While individual and group consulting can be profitable, you may want to consider developing and selling products that are specific to your niche. Many consultants and coaches find that an integrated approach, using individual consulting, group consulting and product sales seems to maximize profit potential. This isn’t the case for every niche, however, and you should spend some time thinking about how it will work best for you.

Identifying your Clients

Finally, you need to identify your clients. Not everyone is going to be a good target for your services and products. You need to identify the groups of people who will be best served by doing business with you.

In the process of narrowing your niche, you have already necessarily narrowed down your potential client base. Using our example, your target market starts with all people who have lower back pain. You can, from here, narrow that client base even further. The purpose of narrowing your client base is so that you can implement more directed marketing techniques. If you want to work primarily with older people, you’re going to use different techniques than if you want to work with younger people, for example. While it isn’t always necessary to narrow your client base, it is one option you have if you find your niche isn’t quite narrow enough.

Once you’ve identified your target market, you can start thinking about specific marketing techniques. Armed with the other planning you’ve done, you can then keep that target market in mind when you design products or create group consulting opportunities, as well.

A successful business requires you to invest some time thinking about these things, and planning accordingly. Doing these things brings your business into focus, giving you some guidelines and overriding principles from which to operate your business. You can increase your chances of success by remaining flexible and adjusting where you need to. This framework can greatly increase your chances of of success.

I have been working with contractors for many years as a client. And it seems there are generalities when contractors come to mind. For example, they never show up on time or they are not business minded people. I have worked with one contractor who defied all these and more. I will share with you how I believe contractors could improve their business ten fold with these ten suggestions.

1) When making an appointment, show up for the appointment on time. This one action will set you apart from the masses. Don’t make the appointment like the cable company, between 9am-4pm. Set one time and arriving at that time would be perfect.

2) When making a bid, give a detailed bid and not a summary of tasks and a total. We all know you need to make money, we just like to see where you are raking us over that’s all. Itemize! And itemize in detail. Some of us know a thing or two about construction and we like to know what is fully involved in a job.

3) Make a list of what needs to be done. Our confidence starts dwindling when we need to remind you about that leaky faucet in the ceiling that needs to be fixed before patching the hole. I don’t think you like us hovering over you and we don’t like hovering over you either. Promise.

4) Over estimate the time the job will take and finish the job before that date. How amazing would it be for a job to be done before a contractor said it would be? Progress reports are awesome too. The client loves to know how far along they are in the project.

5) Be very clear about your payment schedule. No one wants to give their money away, so we’ll hang onto it as long as we can. Also know we won’t pay everything up front, we’re afraid you won’t finish the job. Be clear on when payment is due and how much is due and mark it on the bills.

6) Clean up after yourselves. We don’t like cleaning your messes while we’re trying to keep the rest of the house relatively in order.

7) Under Promise and Over Deliver. We’ve all heard that but not many of us have experienced it. Under Promise and Over Deliver in every and any area you can. It works wonders!!!!

Dress, act and speak professionally. I am not saying you need to wear a suit. But you still need to dress, act and speak professionally even though you’re dirty and dusty. We might have children around and profanities are not welcomed.

9) References automatically available. We all want to speak to someone else who shared their home with you while working on a project. Asking for references might be uncomfortable for some. If you offer then straight off the bat, with names and numbers, we would love that. You could offer a discount for those who are willing to give honest references too.

10) Return all phone calls. Nothing bugs us more then leaving you messages and not getting any return phone calls. We know you’re busy, we all are. But we do appreciate return calls.

So there you have my 10 simple suggestions for a contractor from a client’s perspective. I would love to hear after applying any of these, how your business improved!