This morning I presented at the HOST Victoria Meetup (Home Office Support Team). I really enjoyed being with this group of people and I appreciated their awesome questions.
This is my Powerpoint presentation from that workshop – as promised!
Strategic Planning for a Company of One - November 4 2011If your non-profit organization has been considering embarking on a social enterprise, you should tap into the resources provided by Enterprising Non-Profits. Their next granting application deadline is November 24. Organizations must have participated in an ENP Workshop prior to applying. If you haven’t yet taken in a workshop, definitely put this on your to-do list if you’re in a non-profit that might have even a glimmer of thinking about doing social enterprise.
Directis Consulting has been asked by some organizations to assist with their grant applications and their projects. While we don’t (as a matter of principle) write actual business plans, we can help out with the legwork / building blocks (market research, environmental scans, pro-formas) and facilitate the Board’s process of planning and preparing for a social enterprise. ENP has a great two-pager on Hiring a Consultant which may be of interest if you’re looking for resources outside your organization to help with a social enterprise plan.
Before you get to the stage of embarking on a social enterprise, your Board, Executive Director and key managers do need to have a very clear understanding and agreement on your organization’s mission, core values and the main strategies you will use to achieve your mission. Please don’t begin a social enterprise if there is doubt in your organization about your direction, and be aware that a social enterprise may take several years to yield contributing revenues. It is not the solution to your short or medium-term fund development problems. (But we know people who may be able to help with those).
At the beginning of October, I spent two days with the board, staff and volunteers (at least, a few of them) from the Campbell River Women’s Centre as we developed a strategic plan for the board of the Vancouver Island North Women’s Resource Society (VINWRS). This non-profit organization has a small operating budget and BIG impact in their community, where they are first point of contact for women in crisis or at risk of crisis. Because this has been one of my favorite facilitation jobs this year, I asked if it would be okay for me to share some of the graphics from this retreat on my blog. read more…
This afternoon I’m multi-tasking and working on agendas for strategic planning activities for two different non-profit organizations that support women (and ergo families) who are in crisis or rising above crisis. I am beginning to feel and see more deeply the challenges these organizations are facing this year, with conservative governments slashing grants and erecting ever-greater barriers to funding for services. As I was shaping the agenda for a morning of examining what visions can exist in this challenging environment, my Internet radio station played Avril Lavigne’s song “Keep Holding On.” Listening to the lyrics, I just felt like this is what I wanted to say to these non-profits:
You’re not alone
Together we stand
I’ll be by your side, you know I’ll take your hand
When it gets cold
And it feels like the end
There’s no place to go
You know I won’t give in
No I won’t give in
As a professional, as a woman, as a voter, as a businessperson, it kills me to see the ridiculous gauntlet that’s been thrown down for non-profit organizations to help vulnerable people among us. It’s like the government is made up of a bunch of over-privileged rich folk who have no feelings and no empathy. Non-profits are constantly told to “act more like businesses” but you know what? As a business-person, if my customers demanded ever-greater services, refused to pay on a reasonable time frame (3 months after the service isn’t reasonable), and kept changing their legal names… I’d pack it in. And then the moral duty of our society, to care for our weak and vulnerable, would be left high and dry because there’s no profit in serving them.
It just makes me SO angry. And it reinforces something I hope will become my motto: NEVER SAY DIE.
I know we’re all getting really tired of being asked to cast our votes, and I’m personally hoping they don’t call a BC election for a while yet. However, here’s a vote you can cast EVERY DAY that will make you feel awesome and help somebody real!
Vote for Directis Consulting on CityHUB!
You can find us in the Professional Services category. We’d really appreciate your support as we’re up against some major players with lots of employees who can set up Autovote and walk away with this thing. Well if you Autovote and get all your friends to Autovote too, maybe we’ll have a chance!
Reading this article this morning, I was particularly struck by this statement:
” instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.”
As I settle into my fall work schedule, seeing this concept in black and white is a fantastic reminder of what I’m trying to do here at Directis. It’s in the way I run seminars, the way I work with clients and their businesses, and the way I look for good work partners. It’s what I enjoyed about teaching at Camosun. It’s also why I feel I’m a better strategic planning consultant in some ways than the “50+ ex-executive” type who typically runs a consulting firm, especially for clients who like to think for themselves.
I was raised to value independent thinking above pretty much anything else. I’m sure raising me this way wasn’t easy for my parents, and it’s turning out to be quite difficult to do the same for my four-year-old son. The phrase “teach a person to fish and they’ll eat for life” comes to me as a given. My #1 rule in work is to never, ever do something for somebody so that they don’t learn to do it for themselves. I am not here to teach people how to “do business” but rather how to see business objectively when necessary (and subjectively when appropriate) so they can become more successful on their own terms.
My DIY Strategic Planning resources and seminars, as well as all the visual thinking retreats and business growth consulting, are designed to teach business owners or non-profit leaders to think about things in a disciplined and systematic fashion. You will reach the correct decisions and take the correct actions on your own. It is YOUR success… and I’ll toast to you!
From the “hey that’s really weird” file…
In 2005, I made a handout to accompany a workshop on Customer Service Maps that I presented for the Vancouver Entrepreneur Meetup group. Since I’m presenting on the same topic tonight at Roaring Women, I brought up the old file from my archives and began looking at it for inspiration in putting together tonight’s handouts.
Right there on the first page is a Venn diagram that I created, way back in 2005, to show the overlap between People, Process and Physical Evidence. As I looked at it I thought it was eerily familiar… and then my eye fell upon my business card. The current Directis logo was selected in 2009 from a series of design concepts that my graphic designer presented.
See a funny resemblance?
By Lisa Edwards of Radiate Corporate Wellness
Do you ever wish you could wave your magic wand and make your stress disappear? We’ve all had days where deadlines, personal commitments, and unending email leave us feeling overwhelmed. Stress! Overcoming it may not be quite as easy as waving a wand, but here is a little bit of stress ‘magic’ you can use next time you think you’re going to lose your mind:
Movement
Moving your body instantly changes your thoughts, and puts a bit of space between you and the source of your stress. If you are at your desk, stand up and walk around. Take a minute to shake out your arms and stretch your neck and shoulders. Taking even one minute to walk around will dissipate your stress, and open your mind to alternative ways of looking at a problem.
Acceptance
Get in the habit of accepting each situation exactly the way it is. It’s amazing how much energy is wasted by resisting what is actually happening. A simple example of this is putting off a task or assignment that you don’t want to do. The stress mounts as the days slip by with distractions and excuses. When you finally sit down to do it, most of the time it’s really not so bad. Maybe you even enjoy it! The sooner you can accept a situation, the more energy you will have to take action.
Gratitude
Whenever you are feeling completely overwhelmed, stop. Think of something you are truly grateful for. This alone will get your endorphins flowing and allow you to see possibilities that are right in front of your nose. Cultivating an attitude of appreciation on a daily basis will make you happier and bring more of what you want into your life.
Imagination
Your imagination is one of your greatest gifts – use it! We are all more resourceful than we give ourselves credit for, and the imagination is the gateway to ingenuity. One quick way to get the creative juices flowing is to draw the problem. Go to the whiteboard, or get out a piece of paper and start sketching. Begin with something as simple as a mind map. Even better, think of a metaphor that represents what you are working on. This will allow you to visualize the problem in a new way, and give you ideas about possible solutions you hadn’t considered.
Choice
Remember that you always have a choice. This starts with your ability to choose your thoughts and attitudes about a situation. When you are inundated by stress, this can be easy to forget. Just like everything else, it requires practice. Each time you choose to replace visions of despair with optimistic thoughts, you create positive momentum that prevents stress before it starts. Thinking about the optimal outcome also signals your mind to give you information about how to make that mental picture a reality.
Move your body, accept your reality, be grateful, use your imagination, and choose your attitude; all the magic starts in your mind!
______
Lisa Edwards is the owner of Radiate Corporate Wellness and offers wellness seminars to businesses and professionals. Visit the Radiate website to register for the upcoming 90-min Stress Strategies for Professionals seminar on August 23, 2011 or September 21, 2011 or contact Lisa at 250.896.7939 | lisa@radiatewell.com.
Buzz buzz buzz
As evident from this website and the presence Directis has built through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, we’re believers in social media. Early adopters, you might say (definitely not innovators). Social media, networking and word of mouth have helped us build a great buzz around Directis. So I (Sue) often get asked if I teach social media, to which my usual response is “no… not really… sorta.” Allow me to explain what this answer means and why!
First of all, when building a brand it is very important to choose a focus so people can get a quick and accurate first impression of what you stand for. At Directis, our focus is strategic planning in small businesses and non-profit organizations. We focus on the big-picture issues of managing and growing small organizations. That’s what we write about, teach about and work on. Marketing strategy is a major part of strategic planning but it’s not the only part of the puzzle.
Social media is a really specific part of a marketing strategy. It’s one way that your customers will find you, but certainly not the only one or the best one. So when social media started hitting it big a few years ago, I asked myself if I wanted to get in on the gig of teaching people how to use these tools. It was tempting because it was an emerging market and the tools are generic enough to be useful to a broad customer base who would likely be willing to spend $100-200 per person to learn some new skills. Teaching is one thing I do quite well, and I’ve always been a bit of a geek. However, I knew there’d be lots of entrepreneurs diving into the “social media consulting” field and I have been right about that. Lots of them do it quite well. So I opted out of that line of work and have kept my focus on planning and supporting the overall strategy of a growing organization.
Social media strategy is NOT the same as marketing strategy or strategic planning. There are still plenty of businesses and business people out there who shouldn’t be spending their time on social media. Sure in a few years it’ll become de rigeur to have a Twitter account but it’s not the do-or-die thing that so many people are making it out to be. In the meantime, how are your human resources practices? Do you have a bulletproof capacity to deliver your product or service with 100% quality assurance to customers who’ve validated your offering by putting down their good money for it? If not, maybe it’s time to spend less time on Twitter and more time getting your ducks in a row.
On top of all this, recent relevations concerning Facebook and LinkedIn privacy have given me the willies. Yesterday I discovered Facebook had uploaded to their servers all of the phone numbers for everybody in my cell phone, without my knowing. The information was only visible to me when I was logged in, but the fact remains the data had been transferred to their servers and was sitting there for whatever nefarious purposes hackers might see fit down the road. Then later in the day, Ross Dunn tipped me off that LinkedIn’s default settings allowed it to take certain liberties with my name and profile picture in its social advertising schemes. Huh, I didn’t know that.
If being “authentic” in social media is the way to go (and it is), we have to realize that this authenticity can be exploited by the websites we’re using to connect. It’s that exploitation which made me wonder yesterday if it was time to bail out of Facebook. It’s not going to happen this time, but it might one day. There’s a cost/benefit analysis to be done here and even though I’m fairly immune to alarmist predictions about privacy invasions, things are starting to feel a bit uncomfortable.
Social media isn’t the only way to connect with people, and it’s becoming ever more apparent to me that social media cannot stand alone. You absolutely do have to have “offline” or “IRL (in real life)” connections with people because nobody’s going to buy from a profile pic. Discovering how to make those connections is still a vital priority.
This brings me full circle to teaching about social media. Will I? Not really. I’ve been asked to develop a program for a local business organization that focuses on how to build a buzz through networking, word of mouth AND social media. So, social media will be a part of the program but it’s not going to be about “how to get a Twitter account” but rather, how to develop a buzz around yourself or your business with a central focus. In order to know that central focus, you have to have done your strategic planning. What you want is to introduce yourself and have people say “oh, I’ve heard of you!” and be able to describe what you do, before you’ve even opened your mouth to do your elevator speech. That’s what I’ll be teaching. Details to come!
What if I ran my business like government?
The recent news surrounding BC Hydro’s accounting practices made me shake my head in dismay. When I read about the shenanigans that are happening in BC government finances – allegedly – it sometimes makes me wonder why we all keep agreeing to play this ridiculous shell game.
The fundamental principles of honesty, integrity and transparency have apparently gone the way of the dodo bird, both in government and in the finance sector. The Occupy Wall Street movement, as much as it has its ridiculous flaws and inconsistencies, is at least finally voicing the indignation and frustration “the rest of us” feel when we hear about the games that highly-paid people are playing with paper money. And it’s not just the finance sector, because apparently the BC government and probably our federal government are playing similar games on paper. There seems to be a total lack of accountability for their actions.
This makes me wonder what would happen if I ran my business the way government seems to be running theirs. Since it’s disadvantageous for BC Hydro to post a loss, they’ve rigged their financial statements to show a profit and transfer “funds” to our government. Well right now it’s disadvantageous for Directis to post a profit because I’d have to pay income taxes, so perhaps I’ll just rig my financial statements… oops, no, I can’t. That’s ILLEGAL. Having just written a big fat cheque to the Canada Revenue Agency for my last fiscal year’s taxes and HST remittance, I’m feeling fully cheesed off that somehow the “big guys” are allowed to play hide-and-seek with inconvenient numbers and the rest of us are actually playing by the rules.
You know, even if there was a way for me to cheat and not get caught, I still wouldn’t want to. I was taught to tell the truth, even if it meant revealing I’d done something wrong. I was taught to play by the rules because it’s unethical to benefit from lying or cheating at someone else’s expense. When it comes to paying taxes, I do so because I like the social benefits that our system of government provides, ideologically. I believe that by sharing some of my good fortune in the form of taxes or charitable donations, I will make this country a better place for those who are less fortunate – and benefits will accrue to all of us from living in that sort of society.
So what is there to do, as a small business person, when the “role models” for me in larger corporations or governments seem to have forgotten about “the truth” when it inconveniences them? Well if I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and raise my son with a clear conscience, I’m going to stick to the fundamentals of business and play by the rules: “take the high road.” There’s a certain moral satisfaction in sticking to what I believe is right, and working with other small businesses and non-profit organizations who also believe in doing what is right.