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Outstanding Customer Service!

Posted in: Commentary by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Monday, March 7, 2011

GVCC Awards Logo 2011Directis has been selected as an Award Finalist for the 2011 Greater Victoria Business Awards in the category of Outstanding Customer Service. This is an amazing honour, and I am so grateful to my customers and all my business friends for their vocal support of the nomination.

I honestly expected the finalists would be bigger businesses, so I was really floored to get the email with the news. At the time the email arrived, I was relaxing in my hotel room in Puerto Vallarta. I promptly went out and ordered a couple more blue drinks to celebrate, and then had to struggle to put my brain back into vacation mode!

This makes me even more determined to build a consulting business that honours clients and the trust they place in me and my team. I definitely can’t do it alone! Over the next few weeks I’m going to be introducing you to new associates that I’ll be carefully training to uphold the same high standards that I hold myself to.

And as promised, I’m going to reveal my plans for a summer business development program that will make visual planning accessible to more businesses in the start-up and growth stages.

Stay tuned!

PS If you want to celebrate with me, join me at the GVCC Awards Gala.

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Balancing work, life and weather.

Posted in: Commentary by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray. Isn’t that how the quote goes?

Today was supposed to be my last day in the office before a 10-day break. Thursday and Friday I am attending sewing workshops at the Victoria Sewing and Craft Fair. On Saturday morning I am leaving for a week in Mexico with my husband. The to-do list on my desk at work is daunting, but because of the snow I have been kept at home to look after my little guy. We went for a long play in the park this morning and now I’m trying to get some work done while he watches Pixar movies. There is a battle for elbow-room on the couch as he tries to snuggle up and I try to use my laptop’s touch-mouse.

I feel a little like a dilettante, taking all this time off. Two days of sewing workshops? How is that more important than my client’s projects? A week in Mexico when deadlines rage around me? Isn’t that irresponsible? Hmm. Maybe.

But sanity is the ultimate goal, and when I started this business I did so with the specific value of being a “real” person through it all. Sewing is one of my more lasting hobbies – I have a loft full of fabric, machines, patterns and gadgetry – and this Sewing Fair only happens once a year. I’ve missed it for the past two years. Doing the workshops inspires me creatively, which makes me blissfully happy inside. That happiness is part of the positive vibe that I like to bring to my customers.

This trip to Mexico has been the carrot that’s been keeping me going since December. My husband and I really need this time to reconnect and recharge as a couple (we are leaving our 3-year-old at home with my in-laws). Not going is not an option. Taking my computer along is ALSO not an option because I want to actually relax while I’m down there.

So… with the weather being what it is, I’m going to have to let go of getting some stuff done. I’ll squeeze in a trip to the office on Friday to take out the garbage, tidy my desk and do a minor amount of bookkeeping. I’ll do what I can today on the client projects and proposals. And then, I’m going to deeply enjoy a well-deserved break.

When I come back, I will be SO fired up.

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Why pay-for-performance has to go, and what leaders can do instead.

Posted in: Business Management by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Thursday, February 17, 2011

There’s a war going on. Dug down into the trenches are the traditional compensation and motivation experts that want you to adopt a “pay for performance” system and culture in your business or non-profit organization. Sneaking through the trees like a bunch of vigilantes, you’ll find a loose collection of thinkers & writers who are starting to show the world that a rewards-based motivation system is counterproductive. I’m on the side of the vigilantes, most of the time.

Check out this RSAnimate video featuring the words of Daniel Pink and the awesome drawing of the RSA folks.

People send this link to me all the time and say “check out the awesome graphic facilitation!” (For the record, this is not graphic facilitation. It’s fancy animation. But the awareness of visuals is appreciated and yes this is awesome). Daniel Pink is bringing a lot of knowledge about motivation into the mainstream, building upon the work of the less-jazzy Alfie Kohn and others in the academic world who have been researching and writing about behaviouralism since the 1960s if not before.

What does this all mean to the leader of a small business or non-profit organization? In a nutshell, pay-for-performance schemes should be left behind in favour of more thoughtful leadership.

Are you carrot-happy?

Are you carrot-happy?

1. Forget about trying to build a bonus scheme or compensation scheme that is tied closely to your employees’ performance on the job. It takes a lot of time to develop those schemes in a fair and efficient way, and that sort of thing is better left to the Fortune 500 who have the spare change to pay for legions of compensation specialists.

2. Pay your employees enough that money is not a continual problem for them. You don’t want your employees looking out for a better-paying job all the time because while they love working for you, they don’t love trying to scrape by on a pittance of a salary. Provide a fair compensation structure that recognizes the value of the work your people are doing for you, and enables them to live a reasonably comfortable life given the cost of living in your location. Pay in the middle of the salary range for positions on Monster’s Salary tool, unless you are a particularly small organization or you offer incredible perks, like gourmet meals or lots of vacation time. There’s no need to enable somebody’s excessive spending, but you don’t want people looking over their shoulder for a better paycheque, or burning themselves out by stressing over money or moonlighting to make ends meet.

3. Motivate performance by making it clear to every employee how their efforts and skills contribute to the success of your team as a whole. Make sure that your team/business has goals that your employees can feel good about. Hire people who believe in the same things that your business stands for, because that way you will get alignment between what your employees think is “good” and what you as the owner/leader think is “good.”

4. If you want to provide financial rewards when your organization is doing well, reward the whole team equitably, based on a pre-determined and predictable calculation. For example, tell your employees that the year-end bonus will consist of 15% of the gross profit, split equally among all employees. Don’t try to differentiate between “high performers” or otherwise, because you want every employee to be a high performer. If they’re not, you should replace them.

5. Lead by example in being a high performer. Show your employees what you, as the leader, have as your personal goals and take accountability for them. Tell them when you have succeeded or failed in your goals, and tell them what you learn from your failures when they happen. Being invincible as the CEO doesn’t teach your team anything about accountability or life-long learning.

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Gamestorming: Book review

Posted in: Facilitation by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Thursday, February 17, 2011

Last Saturday night on our hot Valentine’s date, me and hubby stopped into Chapters to browse. In the Business section, where I like to troll for new brilliant ideas, I found this unassuming white volume called Gamestorming.

The full title is “Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers and Changemakers” and the authors are Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. Sunni Brown is a well-known and highly respected graphic facilitator whose portfolio is jaw-droppingly awesome.

What you’ll find, if you open up this fantastic book, is a new look at how groups work collaboratively when they are in retreats or meetings, portrayed through the lens of “games.” As children we create imaginary worlds to play in, and as adults we continue this imaginative creation when we need to be innovative, creative or visionary.

The second part of the book is an exhaustive resource guide to some of the greatest facilitative methods in common use today, with a very strong emphasis on methods that use visual communication or physical artifacts to bring out creativity and new ways of thinking.

There are lots of tools in here which are adapted from The Grove’s ground-breaking graphic templates. I had always figured those templates and methods were off-limits unless I wanted to buy The Grove’s proprietary charts and facilitator guides, but they appear in Gamestorming in brief descriptions that are just enough to get me going.

You can’t become a facilitator by reading this book… far from it. But when you’re needing to guide a group through a process to innovate, rethink, design or otherwise change stuff, this book will be a great place to come for process design ideas.

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Value proposition for a small business consultant

Posted in: Business Management by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Monday, February 14, 2011

One of the exercises I do with clients in a Visual Planning Retreat is called the Business Model Canvas (using the great book Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder as our starting point). In the centre of the Canvas is a box in which we write the core value proposition that the business delivers to customers. Around it, we identify the other parts of the business that make it possible and profitable to deliver that value proposition.

Ironically though, and probably because of the “shoemaker’s children go barefoot” phenomenon, I have yet to enjoy building the business model canvas for myself. Sometimes I wish somebody else was offering Visual Planning Retreats because I would totally pay a competitor to do this with me.

As I was sitting on the couch this evening, catching up on the 783 unread items in my Google Reader (I’m so far behind in most blogs that I’m just clicking “Mark All as Read”), I realized that this very activity I’m doing tonight is part of the value proposition that I deliver to customers as a small business consultant.

Business owners are exceedingly busy people. They have to worry about marketing, sales, product/service delivery, human resources, financial oversight, yadda yadda the list goes on. Let’s face it – they do not get spare time very often, and when they do it’s probably not going to be spent reading back issues of Inc.com or trolling the business section of Chapters for new and unheralded works of insightful genius. But for me, part of the value proposition I deliver to customers IS the fact that I HAVE done (and regularly do) this kind of research. When I’m in product/service delivery mode, part of my “purchasing” or inbound logistics is actually the sourcing, consuming and synthesizing of new ideas and knowledge about working ON a business. Or a non-profit association.

Sometimes it feels like I am on a constant learning curve. I worry sometimes, to be honest, at how much knowledge about entrepreneurship, leadership, marketing, etc. etc is out there which I seem to be missing. But tonight it just finally twigged for me – the stream of knowledge is never-ending. I am more tapped into it than most if not all of my clients – and that represents a big part of the value that I bring to the table (well that, and the great markers).

Ironically, I have now come full circle to the mission statement I wrote for Directis Consulting in 2003 when I started up the business: Synthesizing the best practices and ideas in business being written about “out there” and then being able to apply it with context-specific insight to a client’s business.

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Getting my Google on – going with Google Apps for small business

Posted in: Commentary by Susan Low | Read the 1 Comment and add yours Friday, February 11, 2011

One of the drawbacks of having multiple computers (home, office, laptop, Android) has always been that I keep finding myself in one place needing information that is in another place. Two years ago I switched to using GMail instead of Microsoft Outlook for my email and calendar tracking and I have really enjoyed that. I’ve still been struggling with being effective at my time management and opportunity tracking (for sales) so in late January, I embarked on a new project: Google Apps. Yep, I’m going up into the cloud.

The process has been quite encouraging, but not easy. Allow me to share my journey and observations!

read more…

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“It was Amazing!”

Posted in: Commentary by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Friday, January 28, 2011

Laura from Gallery Greetings, winner of the Visual Planning Retreat contest, agreed to be interviewed on video about her experience.

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Rules of inertia

Posted in: Business Management by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Making change happen is subject to the rules of inertia just as everything else. A body in motion stays in motion, and a body at rest stays at rest until acted upon by some external force.

A group of people (say, a work team) will resist change not out of maliciousness or lack of motivation, but due to inertia. They are on a trajectory related to what is happening in the team (or not happening), so if you hope for change you must present a force stronger than inertia.

Fear is a common choice. A burning platform is a cliche for a situation in which people must choose between staying in a place of certain death, or jumping into a place of near-certain death or possible rescue. Imagine being on a burning oil-drilling platform in the North Sea. Dramatic, yes, but when a business is facing ultimate crisis, people will change to save their jobs.

But fear doesn’t always work, and it leaves scars. Deep ones. If you create a burning platform falsely, you will massacre any hope of trust in your people. So what is the alternative?

A sense of identity and hope is a good start. Seek out small wins and show people it can be done – each win is a small pebble rolling down the hill and this is how you build a different inertia. Pretty soon you have an avalanche.

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Making Change Happen

Posted in: Current Events by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Saturday, January 22, 2011

Monday February 21, 2011 – Monday February 21, 2011

View Map | Register

Description:

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Gandhi

How’s that working for you?

What is it that separates successful businesses from the ones who plod along in a rut? I think it’s an ability to make change happen to support growth or recover from a crisis. But as anyone who’s set a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight can tell you, making real, lasting change happen is an elusive talent. Even more so when the change effort has to be supported by a team: getting employees and co-workers to collaboratively change their actions and beliefs is a real challenge. But it’s not impossible.

During this two-hour workshop, you will:

  • Learn tools to motivate and direct change within an organization
  • Practice a method for holding conversations that will move people towards action
  • Hear about how a 20-person software company has grown from a “mom and pop” operation into a professional service provider working with clients across Canada, without sacrificing their entrepreneurial culture or values.

The tools are deceptively simple, and the stories are compelling. You’ll be able to apply these things directly in your own work and see immediate results in your ability to make change happen in your business.

Register

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Words from a winner…

Posted in: Commentary by Susan Low | Be the first to leave a comment Thursday, January 20, 2011

Laura Byatt (Gallery Greetings) was the winner of the Visual Planning Retreat 2011 Contest. Not one to waste time, Laura contacted me right away and we did her Visual Planning Retreat this past Monday. We drew out her business model, using many stick figures and boxes to show the different channels she can use to get her products to market. Then we did some numbers work to figure out how her profit margin would look based on different distribution strategies, and discussed pricing strategies. Finally, we created a timeline for 2011 showing how the two selected distribution channels would need to be managed through the year to make sure she has her products “out there” in the right seasons, with plenty of preparation time.

Laura emailed me this morning… here’s the scoop:

I can’t tell you how much your planning retreat has helped me already.  It was so great to work with you and I can’t thank you enough!!  I got soooo much out of it, and am so enthusiastic about moving forward from here :)

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