Thanks for following me here for so long. I’ve made the decision to incorporate my blog into my main website. I hope you will follow and continue reading!
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www.IDiscoverConsulting.com/blog
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Hey everyone! As you know, I like to start the week with a good roundup of some of the 
best articles I’ve come across in recent days. I like to look for articles on leadership, marketing, customer relationships, branding, technology, strategy, etc. that will be of interest to business owners and leaders. So, here’s this week’s summary of must-reads:
As Q4 races toward us (Next week! Yikes!), it’s a good time to step back and look at where we are strategically this year. Most of us still have 2016 goals that we’d like to achieve. It’s not too late. With three months left in the year it’s going to be about highlighting the key goal(s) still left and focus your business on achieving them.
Here’s how I would recommend going about it.
Be honest. Look back at your key goals (hopefully there were only an important few). Have you met them? Are you making progress toward them? You have to begin by being open and honest about where your company stands.
Of the goals that are left unachieved, identify the most important one. What is the one goal that will make the most positive impact on your business? A good practice is to do this as a leadership team. You might, as the business’s leader, have an idea about what the main priority should be for the rest of 2016; but really it’s better if you do this as a team. Get everyone on board and in agreement. Look at that goal carefully. Be crystal-clear about how achieving this goal will impact your business. In short, know why this is important to the future of your company.
Make sure (you should already have this but….) and be clear about how you are going to measure success. It’s critical that you know where you stand and develop a strategy (or a set of strategies) for getting your company from Point A to Point B. Brainstorm with your team. Arrive at a solid strategy that your team is in agreement with.
Think about how any strategy gets achieved. Is it you the business’s leader. Maybe a little. Is it your leadership team? Yes, they of course play a part. But who makes that day-to-day progress driving toward the goal? It’s the people on the ground. The front-line people. The transaction people. The workers. The delivery people. The receptionists. Just as our workers are the backbone of our economy, they are also the backbone of your individual business. So, let’s not keep them in the dark. Let’s be clear. Let’s get them on board. Let’s get them excited about the goal. Let’s get them focused on this strategy and their place in it. The coach doesn’t win on the field, the players do.
When you hit that goal, when your Q4 is successful be sure to step back and celebrate what you and your team have achieved. Whether it’s a party, whether it’s bonuses, whatever it is for your business, find a way to acknowledge that the team stayed focused, pulled together, and made a key strategic goal happen.
So, you think 2016 is whizzing by you and your business? Some goals have been nailed. Some are still unmet. Some are in progress. But Q4 is essentially here. You can make it a great quarter for your team. You can identify and knock down the most-impactful goal left to make positive change for your business in 2016. But you need to take some time to get focused on just what that goal is and how you and your team will go about achieving it. Come January you’ll look on Q4 with a big, fat smile on your face. How will that feel? 🙂
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Make sure you get your company focused on that biggest goal, so you can finish 2016 strongly. Sometimes it also takes some help to get it all done. Please feel free to reach out and get in touch and let’s explore how I can help you and your business succeed. No pressure. Just an informal discussion to explore some ideas. You can reach me at (713) 907-8429 or BCohen@IDiscoverConsulting.com.
I hope you are enjoying these blog posts If so, please help spread the word. Tell others about IDiscover Consulting Group and IDiscover Journal. Share these posts. Comment on them. I’d really love to hear your ideas!
Hello again everyone! I hope you had a great weekend. ups was mostly filled with back-to-school 
stuff. Fun, right? Anyway, as always let’s start the week with a roundup of the best articles for business leaders I came across recently.
Sometimes it’s hard for us to ascribe human characteristics to nonhuman entities like
businesses. But, you know, often they do have these characteristics – and it makes sense to think about organizations in this way. One of these traits is “personality” – that set of characteristics that often influence the way we see people. A business also has a set of characteristics that make up it’s “personality” and help define how those outside the organization view it, react to its brand, and interact with it.
An organization’s personality is derived from its foundational core values and mission. The organization’s brand is derived from that foundation – and its personality can be thought of as the way the brand interacts with the world around it. Think about “personality” as that layer that sits between the internal and the external and which helps the outside understand the inside (if managed well). And manage it we should.
Think about people you know (those you like and those you don’t). What words do we use when we talk about a person’s personality? They are fun, happy, irresponsible, morose, hardworking, trusting, trustworthy, loyal, humble, difficult, adventurous, boring, flaky, social, unsocial, funny, witty – and the list can go on and on.
Now consider companies and organizations you like (or don’t) – Apple, the IRS, McDonald’s, Shake Shack, BMW, Ford, Home Depot, a local restaurant, a small retailer in your neighborhood. Every one of them has some form of a personality. And I’ll bet within 60 seconds you can list at least ten adjectives to describe it.
Now let’s flip the exercise around. You are a business leader. What would be the ten adjectives you’d like your most important target customers and prospects to list? And (be honest) are they the ones you think they will list? Why or why not? Are you doing anything proactively to manage their perceptions? (Now this is getting a little deeper isn’t it?)
Managing your business’s personality can make a BIG difference in your success. It just makes sense, right? We strive to be around people we like, people we affiliate with, people we respect and whose values we understand, people we feel like we know. In a lot of ways businesses are no different. Consumers look for ways to interact with organizations that meet their needs and have an engaging personality. So, what steps can you take to create and cultivate your business’s personality?
Go though the process and see how those audience/prospect/customer adjectives change. Like most important, strategic shifts it won’t happen overnight. But keep at it. Stay focused on that personality and the “voice” you use to communicate.
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Being a business’s leader is never easy. Creating a vision takes creativity. Sharing that vision takes guts. Sometimes it also takes some help. Please feel free to reach out and get in touch and let’s explore how I can help you and your business succeed. No pressure. Just an informal discussion to explore some ideas. You can reach me at (713) 907-8429 or BCohen@IDiscoverConsulting.com.
I hope you are enjoying these blog posts If so, please help spread the word. Tell others about IDiscover Consulting Group and IDiscover Journal. Share these posts. Comment on them. I’d really love to hear your ideas!
Good morning everyone! I hope you had a nice weekend. We sure did here. We celebrated my oldest
daughter’s confirmation at church and got to visit with family. Very nice!
Well, as I always like to do, let’s start this week with some of the best articles from the last week or so – and, yes, some tips and insights from me as well. Enjoy!
Last week I was thinking quite a bit about the things that hold our companies back; the things that limit the growth of our companies. I shared a few tips I shared on social media:
And in my latest blog post, I dug a little deeper into one of the key behaviors that might be holding your company back – your mindset, your lack of a bold vision. I’d love for you to read “Is Your Lack of Vision Holding Your Company Back?” and let me know your thoughts.
Your business’s growth may have stalled or just may not be growing as fast as you might 
like. It’s natural to ask why? As the business’s leader you want to know what’s getting in the way. What’s limiting (or even blocking) your business’s growth? Sometimes it’s obvious. Sometimes not. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that one limiting factor is almost always at play – a lack of vision. It’s time to ask yourself is your mindset is holding your company back.
So often I see companies with a limited vision about what’s possible. They are primarily held down by the past – how things have been done, the results obtained before, etc.
I’m sure you’ve heard this story before. In May 1954, Roger Bannister ran a mile in three minutes 59.4 seconds. Until that point it was thought that the 4-minute barrier was impossible for humans to break. It was commonly believed that the human body wasn’t capable of that speed. Until it was. And you know what? Forty-six days (yes, days) later Bannister’s record was broken. Within a few years many would break that mark that was previously thought impossible.
It turns out the culprit, the barrier, wasn’t the entire human body, only the brain. When people’s mindset changed, so did their goals. Is your business mired in that same mindset. We’ve never made X amount of money before, so how would we ever do it? We’ve never sold that new product before, so why would anyone buy it from us now? We’ve never entered a new market in under X days/weeks/months so how could we now? It can ALL be done with the right mindset.
It begins with a vision. Not a boring plan or a textbook-derived strategy… a vision. What can be done. And honestly some of the best visions are the boldest. These visions suggest doing things that others commonly believe can’t be done.
A few years back I was advising the CEO of a nonprofit about a variety of issues. One thing I suggested to her time and time again was the need for a broad vision for her organization. Her typical response was that she didn’t have enough money…or enough staff…or whatever. So what was the point of “dreaming”? Sigh. I firmly believe she had it backwards.
You usually don’t get the money and the resources and then dream up a vision to invest them in. No one hands you a million dollars and says “Go figure out something grand to do with it.”. Nope. This is the real world. You need to have a future vision, understand those things that are in the way of achieving your vision and knocking them down. But those barriers typically don’t come down unless you first have a clear vision for what you want to achieve. You build a long-term vision and bring others into that vision. Then you kick down the barriers that are in your way. Develop a strategy for making the vision a reality. Find a way to get the money. Bring on resources in a creative, effective, and efficient way.
So, today I encourage you to step back and look at your vision for your business’s future. Do you even have one? It’s so easy to be caught up in the day-to-day that we just forget. Or sometimes we feel that without unlimited resources we can’t achieve a old long-term vision. Wrong. Build a vision. Get others on board. Kick in some doors. See what you and your team can achieve together!
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Being a business’s leader is never easy. Creating a vision takes creativity. Sharing that vision takes guts. Sometimes it also takes some help. Please feel free to reach out and get in touch and let’s explore how I can help you and your business succeed. No pressure. Just an informal discussion to explore some ideas. You can reach me at (713) 907-8429 or BCohen@IDiscoverConsulting.com.
I hope you are enjoying these blog posts If so, please help spread the word. Tell others about IDiscover Consulting Group and IDiscover Journal. Share these posts. Comment on them. I’d really love to hear your ideas!
Hello all! I hope you had a great weekend. As always I like to begin the week by sharing some of the
best articles I have come across over the last few days (along with some of my own stuff). Happy reading!
And my last blog post went into some detail about why this is so important, what to look for, and how to get and deal with that information: No Surprises: Face Issues Head-on. I’d love to hear your experience with this. Please share any thoughts you have.
It’s natural. We like to hear good things, not bad. We like to hear that someone knows and 
likes us. If they don’t, well maybe we’re not in such a hurry to hear those. But we should.
Having worked with many business leaders over the years I have seen this behavior all too often. When we help a client collect customer and market feedback, leaders want to be protected from hearing uncomfortable truths. In fact, more than once I’ve had business leaders ask us not to ask specific questions. More often than not, they are motivated by the fear that the data might not be positive. C’mon people, really? My typical response is to ask them consider if not asking a question makes the issue not exist? Just because you don’t ask is a customer is happy, can you infer that they are. Of course not. If you neglect to ask someone in your target market how aware they are of your brand does that mean they are keenly aware of it? Of course not. A difficult issue may or may not exist; you simply don’t know about it. You can’t then pursue changes and improvements.
As a leader I propose that you pursue a culture of openness. Knowing the truth (no matter how difficult to hear) is a much better approach/stance. Here’s where to look.
Is there anything more important than keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer relationships? I think not. And yet companies often avoid some of the most critical elements of those relationships. We’re fearful of what people will say.
Honestly it’s like any other human relationship. It may be on solid ground or not. And sometimes even if we suspect things are not quite healthy we’re afraid to ask. But it’s always better to know. Then we can deal with any problems or issues. We can pinpoint areas of particular importance to customers and perhaps where our performance is struggling. We can put a plan in place to make things better.
Yes, sometimes that means bringing the relationship to an end. For a business, this might be a customer or client that is not squarely in our target market and/or is not a profitable customer. It’s better to know that status of these relationships, so we can make intelligent, conscious decisions about next steps to take. Not knowing leaves us (blissfully, I guess) in the dark – which could be a costly lack of knowledge.
We like to think everyone (at least everyone that should) knows about us. News-flash! It may or may not be true. We live in a bubble sometimes. We are so engrossed in our own companies, so tied up in our day-to-day that it’s hard to imagine anyone NOT knowing about our great company that can bring so much value to our target customers. But, alas, it’s often true. And we need to know about that. Having accurate information about awareness (and perceptions) of our brand will help us adjust to assess our existing marketing and promotional strategies and budgets – and make changes accordingly. Not knowing? Well, we’ll just keep making assumptions that things are working and that everyone loves us. Do yourself a favor, research this all-important issue. Carefully identify your target market and ask them what they know of your brand and what opinions they have about it. Know if there’s a gap (and there almost always is) between what they know and perceive and what we’d like them to know and perceive. Implement changes to bridge that gap.
It’s easy to let this one get away from you. As your day-to-day business operation gets busy, looking at the details of your financial results may fall by the wayside. After all, it feels like things are busy and money’s coming it. The problem? You may be running smack into a cash crunch. Be careful. As I’ve stated before on this blog, cash is truly king. I’ve seen cases where companies feel that things are going well. The company is growing, money is coming in the door, and new customers keep showing up. Sounds idyllic, huh And it can be. Or our seemingly positive financial condition can be deteriorating right under our noses.
How can that be? Providing products, services, and/or customer support to customers may be costing more than they are bringing in. Marketing, sales and other administrative costs may be growing too fast and squeezing our financial condition. Trust me. There are plenty of ways to run out of dollars when you feel like things are going well. It’s key to have reporting and measures in place that get to the heart of your true financial position – and watch them carefully.
Every now and again we can just sense that something’s wrong when it comes to employees. Water cooler gossip. Disagreements. Rule-bending or breaking. Missed deadlines. Increasing turnover. Customer service quality drops. Product and service quality suffers. There are tons and tons of signs. An experienced exec can begin to sense these things. And sometimes we like to turn the other way and pretend (or hope?) that nothing’s wrong. We tell ourselves that we are reading too much into a situation. And since an unhappy employee team is just about the last thing we want, we try to ignore what we know in our gut is a problem.
Good leaders will tackle these issues head-on. In today’s competitive world you don’t have the luxury of ignoring employee issues. They typically get worse. As uncomfortable as it may be jumping on the issue proactively and understanding it is usually the best way to go.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between a big issue and a less consequential issue. But digging deeper into these concerns you will be able to understand them better and be able to know which category your issue(s) falls into. The one thing you can’t is ignore it and hope it doesn’t exist or that is goes away. Don’t fall into that trap. Proactively wade into areas where you suspect employees are struggling.
Is the competitive landscape in your industry shifting. Are new competitors popping? Are customers noting frustration with elements of your products or service that no longer meet their needs? Does your product/service mix feel stale? Have competitors caught up with you or begun to offer options and functionality that you simply don’t. Have the needs of the consumer changed? Make sure you remain on top of your competitive environment. Ignoring existing or potential challengers until it’s too late can leave you in a difficult position.
Finally, I wanted to highlight the issue of products and services and whether they are still meeting the needs of your target customers. If it’s been awhile since you launched your product/service line(s), step back and look at them. Don’t assume that they still serve the needs of customers as they always have. Don’t assume what you think are important functions are also important to customers or potential customers. Find out. Ask customers. (Duh!) Ask salespeople what they are hearing. Ask customer service people what they are hearing. and then do something about it.
Most likely your list will be longer than you want to or are able to tackle immediately. Nope. You can’t do everything at once. So prioritization is in order. Deal with those issues that are most critical. And along the way communicate with customers. Tell them what you are working on and why. Even (gasp!) let them help design, test, and redesign changes.
So what do you do about all of this. It’s a lot to think about. The key is to ensure that you have processes in place that measure the different aspects of your business in a clear, open, and honest way. You have to foster a culture of inquiry and openness within your company. Let everyone know that it’s better to know the truth than to ignore potentially significant issues that can and will pull your company down. You want to hear what’s truly going on. It’s always better to know the truth, so you can plan and manage important challenges that may (and WILL) come your way. The health of your company may depend on it.
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Being a business’s leader is never easy. I’d love to help you investigate what’s important, measure it, and design a plan to tackle any issues. Please feel free to reach out and get in touch and let’s explore how I can help you and your business succeed. No pressure. Just an informal discussion to explore some ideas. You can reach me at (713) 907-8429 or BCohen@IDiscoverConsulting.com.
I hope you are enjoying these blog posts If so, please help spread the word. Tell others about IDiscover Consulting Group and IDiscover Journal. Share these posts. Comment on them. I’d really love to hear your ideas!
Happy Monday everyone. My family had nice little “stay-cation” right here in Houston. A weekend 
of hotel, restaurants, hotel pool, etc. I think everybody had a great time. Now back to business. And to start with, here’s my weekly summary of some great articles from the last week or so. Enjoy!
Yahoo: Business Entrepreneur Magazine Fast Company Magazine Inc. Magazine
IDiscover Journal 