May 14, 2018 "Five key lessons from the Globe small-business summit": Today I found this article by Camilla Cornell in the Globe and Mail:
Some of the country’s leading entrepreneurs gathered May 8 for The Globe and Mail Small Business Summit in Toronto. Panels and talks focused on a range of business issues, from recruiting talent to expanding to the United States. Here are five key take-aways.
1. You need true grit. Entrepreneurs rarely tell you about the times they wondered whether they would be able to make a go of their venture, says April Dunford, founder of Rocket Launch Marketing. “It doesn’t make for a very good story when you say, ‘Everyone was fighting and we had to fire the founder,’” she says. “So we just tell the last bit where we came up with a good idea and it rocketed to the moon and we all made a billion dollars.”
But every successful business has multiple “everything-looks-terrible moments,” she says. “You have to persevere. The best entrepreneurs just push through it.”
2. Want to know your true value? Listen to your customers. Nine years ago, when Emily Chung founded auto repair shop AutoNiche Inc. in Markham, Ont., she had a clear vision of the customers she wanted to attract. Ms. Chung was initially inspired to become a mechanic and start a shop because, as a woman, she felt taken advantage of by mechanics. So she focused her initial marketing efforts on conveying that hers was a “woman-friendly repair shop.”
The problem: She quickly realized about 85 per cent of her clients were men. “We started asking them why they chose us,” she says. Her findings? Men tend to be assigned the task of bringing the car in for repair. Yet they often know little about the mechanics of a vehicle. They liked the idea of taking their cars to a “comfortable place” where they wouldn’t be bombarded with technical jargon. In response to that feedback, Ms. Chung respun her marketing strategy to promote the idea that her shop was family-friendly. “It was a good lesson to learn early on,” she says.
3. Swallow the U.S. one bite at a time. When Elana Rosenfeld, co-founder and CEO of Invermere, B.C.-based Kicking Horse Coffee, first brought her organic, Fair Trade coffee to markets south of the border, she met with limited success. “We weren’t really going after it in any kind of structured way,” she says.
But when she brought in a U.S.-based equity investor in 2012, Ms. Rosenfeld took advantage of the company’s knowledge of the American market to fashion a more strategic approach. “The U.S. is such a massive, complicated landscape compared to Canada,” she says. “You can’t look it as one country. You have to look at it as many.”
Her solution: She would tackle it one region at a time, pinpointing those with a “similar psychographic of consumer that would relate to our brand.” Her first foray was into the Rocky Mountain region, where she invested in some sassy marketing and a good sales team. Once she built market traction there, she took on the Pacific Northwest, bearing “some really good data” as proof of success. The result? “Now we’re all across the U.S.,” says Ms. Rosenfeld.
4. Doing good can be a recruiting tool. When Jim Estill, president and CEO of Guelph, Ont., manufacturer Danby Appliances, decided to sponsor 50 Syrian families (he ended up sponsoring 61) to come to Canada in 2015, his goal was simply to help out. He was dismayed by images of the humanitarian crisis.
But Mr. Estill soon discovered that his grand gesture not only resonated with the press, “it created massively high engagement in my staff,” he says. “Turns out they were much more interested in saving the world than in making more freezers.”
One of Danby’s truck drivers voluntarily gave up 16 weekends in a row to help the refugees move into housing. And as the news spread, Danby became an employer of choice for millennials who wanted to work for a business with a conscience. The unintended consequence: “I stopped advertising for employees,” says Mr. Estill. “I get five or six people applying every single day.”
5. Don’t forget what’s important. “I have dinner with my kids twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday,” says Charles Khabouth, founder and principal of Toronto-based hospitality company INK Entertainment. “But last night I was opening a new restaurant. My assistant was sitting across from me and the chef was bringing out food, wanting me to tell her what I thought. The GM was behind me tapping me on the shoulder and I could see the general contractor waiting at the door.”
By the end of the meal, Mr. Khabouth’s daughter had started to cry. “I’m not coming to have dinner with you any more,” she told him. He recalls the moment with sadness, admitting that finding a way to juggle work and family can be tremendously difficult as an entrepreneur. “It sucks you in so bad. It has been a struggle for me,” says Mr. Khabouth. “But my best advice is to try to find some kind of balance.”
"Why good leaders make grave mistakes": Today I found this article by Merge Gupta-Sunderji in the Globe and Mail:
Stuff happens. Well-laid plans don’t always turn out exactly the way you’d anticipated. A sale that was one signature away from being finalized falls apart at the last minute. One missed detail takes a project down the wrong path and it then costs a significant amount to bring it back on track.
The leadership journey is fraught with unexpected challenges and unknown landmines, and sometimes even the smallest misstep by a leader can result in financial and reputational loss.
Some mistakes will be small, ones you can simply shrug off as minor bumps in the road. But others will be large, ones that affect major company objectives, directly impact profitability, or put important relationships in jeopardy.
It’s how you respond to these large slip-ups that will determine whether you’re a leader or a manager.
When it comes to battling blunders and successfully moving forward, three essential actions separate the leaders from the managers.
Accept responsibility
Leaders accept full responsibility for mistakes. Unequivocally. Sure, other people and other factors may have contributed to the error, but at the end of the day, leaders admit accountability and take full ownership for the missteps. Leaders don’t blame; they don’t point fingers; they don’t deflect answerability. They own up to the mistake and they apologize.
When you accept ownership for errors made within your span of responsibility, you earn respect. You see, people don’t expect perfection from their leaders. Rather, they appreciate you more when you show vulnerability, when you let them see that you have experienced the same problems and overcome similar obstacles as they have.
So when leaders create an environment of transparency by being honest about where they messed up, ironically they warrant admiration rather than contempt.
So when leaders create an environment of transparency by being honest about where they messed up, ironically they warrant admiration rather than contempt.
But acknowledging culpability and showing contrition isn’t enough, it is only the first step of three.
Mitigate the damage
Leaders also take deliberate and measured actions to mitigate the damage. They seek to either resolve the situation or minimize its impact. When plans go awry, they develop an alternate approach.
When a contract negotiation begins to falter, they look for points of commonality and concession. When a job is completed incorrectly, they find a way to either fix the mistake or redo it from the beginning.
No matter what the issue is, they always make it a point to keep senior management in the loop, emphasizing the specific and the quantitative, the impacts and outcomes, and the corrective actions being taken and planned. Fixing mistakes is rarely easy, but the harder they are to correct, the greater the potential to separate the leaders from the managers.
When a contract negotiation begins to falter, they look for points of commonality and concession. When a job is completed incorrectly, they find a way to either fix the mistake or redo it from the beginning.
No matter what the issue is, they always make it a point to keep senior management in the loop, emphasizing the specific and the quantitative, the impacts and outcomes, and the corrective actions being taken and planned. Fixing mistakes is rarely easy, but the harder they are to correct, the greater the potential to separate the leaders from the managers.
Identify the lessons learned
The third step is the one that is most often missed. It is to deliberately and thoughtfully learn from the experience by identifying the lessons learned. What needs to be modified – processes, training, documentation or something else – in order to prevent the same or similar mistake from occurring again?
This exercise should be done with your team, rather than in isolation. Given that your people are on the front lines, they likely have compelling insights into what went wrong and how a similar situation might be avoided in the future. But it requires a climate of trust to make this work.
And this goes back to your willingness to accept responsibility for the mistake in the first place. When leaders admit to making mistakes, it not only earns respect, it ultimately builds a culture of trust. And it’s this environment of trust that will permit and encourage your staff to speak up and offer pre-emptive solutions for the future.
And this goes back to your willingness to accept responsibility for the mistake in the first place. When leaders admit to making mistakes, it not only earns respect, it ultimately builds a culture of trust. And it’s this environment of trust that will permit and encourage your staff to speak up and offer pre-emptive solutions for the future.
Once you have determined what procedural and other changes need to be made, articulate them to your senior management. In order to maintain their confidence in you and your team, they need to know what you’re doing to prevent such blunders from occurring again. And perhaps most importantly, make sure you follow through and keep whatever commitments you make as part of this final step.
Leaders know that all decisions carry risk and therefore come with potential obstacles that can sometimes derail progress. But when bad stuff happens, what separates the leaders from the managers are three things. Leaders readily take responsibility for what went wrong, actively work to fix the immediate problem and then deliberately look for ways to learn from the experience.
Merge Gupta-Sunderji is a speaker and consultant, and founder of Turning Managers into Leaders.
There is only 1 comment:
the real business Leaders dont thrive in Business , political type, clinically psychopathic Managers do .Fact!. Very hard to find true leaders in business anymore . Look at our banks and largest companies …. then I think you would agree . 90% are non-leaders. Our sociology demands it at this point. Pity !
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