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Tag: senior

  • Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

    Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

    When we asked 150 senior executives from Marketing, Sales, Operations, Administration, and Human Resources, what one thing they wanted to make their day more manageable, the vast majority answered with the same response. It wasn’t great software or IT support, it wasn’t higher salary, it wasn’t free sodas or a ping pong table in the break room, or T-shirt day, or birthday cake for all . . . the most popular answer was just one word – Time.

    Executives are starved for time – time to think, to contemplate, time to digest and cogitate, time to reflect, time to delegate, to mentor, to research, to connect on more than a cursory level with their colleagues. Prioritizing of their schedules, maximizing time efficiency, finding ways to do more than one thing at a time or to parallel schedule so that multiple tasks coincide, are the number one mental activity on a daily basis for senior leaders.

    Their plates are more than full.

    Between their own business responsibilities, outside Board affiliations, community and charitable organizations, sponsorship obligations, professional association activities, speaking engagements, family commitments and personal networking, the 18-hour day is becoming standard for senior leaders of national and global firms. While many would intone “That’s why they get the big bucks,” and “should have known before they took the job,” no amount of money or foreknowledge would have compensated or prepared the normal individual for that level of constant activity and commitment. It’s a grinding pace, and it can only be sustained for so long before their personal health and often the health of the firm suffer as a result. The average tenure of a global level, publicly held firm CEO is less than three years, and it stands to reason that the schedule, and the hunt for unscheduled time, might have a great deal to do with that. While capricious boards, fickle investors, vague and punishing financial markets add their own land mines to an already dangerous traverse, the level of personal energy required is virtually unsustainable by the average human.

    Ari

    For those who need access to, and engagement from, these top C-Suite officers, this insight could mean the difference between productive contact and being put in the “pay no mind” column. Long, rambling voice mails, five-page e-mails, 9-lb promotional brochure bombs, 40-page white papers, are just not in these guys’ future, and will not only deny you the attention you need, but irritate the recipient for not respecting the limited time they have available for such activities. It’s not that they don’t want to engage with you, or that they’re ignoring you, it’s just that you’ve come in at the end of a very long priority string, and have to wait your turn. The more hurdles you place in the way of that turn being productive, the lower your odds of connecting in a meaningful way.

    Short, sweet, decisive, get-to-the-point type communications win the day for these guys – strong, direct images, simple, direct language, compelling offers, real business cases that apply directly, and have relevance to them, are the key to success. Think about it: if you have a line of people waiting outside your office, a full calendar, a charity dinner and speech to prepare, and are flying to a board meeting later in the week, the last thing you want to do is wade through a long, rambling memo, a multi-page brochure with a barely comprehensible letter, with a tentative, limp offer that barely fits within the company’s “needs” basket. Poor choice of activities at best, when there are that many other, potentially more lucrative things waiting in the wings. A short e-mail promising a viable alternative and offering lunch next week, a few sentences at best, is more likely to get some attention.

    Time is one of the few elements of a person’s job that they have limited control over. Time can’t be manufactured, can’t be augmented, can’t be stopped or delayed, bought, coerced, finagled, negotiated or bullied. It marches onward, unbidden and unaffected by your need for more, or to speed up or slow down to make room for more tasks. So, the main goal is usually just to prioritize the time you do have, to maximize the return on effort expended, and meet as many obligations as possible. Where those priorities are allocated, how they are parsed and balanced, is often the difference between success and not, over the long haul. A famous executive has been quoted as saying “I have time for the important things. The questions is, what is important at the time?” Pick the things that are important to you long term, and prioritize them above the rest – success can’t be far behind, however you define it.

  • How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

    How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

    Adding a senior employee can bring short-term costs but long-term gains. Here’s how to tell if the time is right for your business.

    When you’re the owner of a small business, knowing when to hire a senior employee isn’t always easy — but it is important. By freeing you to focus on high-value activities where you have true expertise, it can help you take your company to the next stage of growth or, in some cases, simply ensure its continued viability.

    “Entrepreneurs are accustomed to hiring ancillary employees and pawning off smaller tasks on them,” observes Dave Poulos, chief consultant at Granite Partners LLC in Sparks, Maryland. “But at some point, they discover that they’re working their tails off and still can’t be everywhere they need to be or do everything they need to do. That’s when they need to make a high-level hire.”

    While cost can be an issue, Poulos says companies should consider how much they might be able to boost revenues with a new player on the management team. Ideally, it will more than cover the additional salary.

    Chuck Cohn, CEO of Varsity Tutors, a Washington, D.C.-based tutoring service, says that over the past several years he’s “fired” himself from various duties and brought in expert replacements to handle, among other things, bookkeeping, sales and advertising. “Each time it’s had a dramatic impact on how effectively that role is done, my happiness, and our ability to grow — because my time became available for higher-level projects,” he says.

    Wondering whether your company is a candidate for a high-level hire? Here are five signs it may be time to expand the executive suite:

    1. You’re working long hours but missing operational goals or revenue targets. Julie Sue Auslander, president and chief cultural officer at cSubs, a New Jersey-based provider of outsourced subscription services, says a bell tolled for her when she realized that she was doing “a lot of work” but never seemed to have any money.

    “I hired cheap, tried to do it all myself, hired multiple part-timers, and, as a result, missed out on growth opportunities,” she says. Taking a new tack, she outsourced payroll and brought in a bookkeeper who discovered that some invoices were being paid twice or in the wrong amount while some of her own clients weren’t being billed at all. “The revenue I realized from her correct work covered her salary,” she says. “In addition, offloading those activities freed me to do work that nobody else could, and in turn helped my company reach the Inc. 5000 list.”

    Auslander has since hired a part-time controller, which has helped her secure additional funding for her business, enter comfortably into strategic partnerships, and even plan an exit strategy for herself.

    2. Critical parts of your business are proving error-prone or inefficient, and you don’t know how to fix them. Eric Thomasian, head of business development and strategy for Blayze Inc., an online video company, says his firm knew it was time to hire a chief technology officer after its technology systems, which had been outsourced to a third-party developer, turned out to be bug-ridden and not true to their original design.

    “As soon as we made the hire, our CTO hired more coders to create an internal technical team,” Thomasian says. The results were impressive. Turnaround time on system changes rose by 800 percent, funding became more easily attainable because investors felt safer when they could actually meet the company’s technical team face-to-face, and customer satisfaction increased by 90 percent.

    3. Essential tasks are going unfinished. Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting, a business consultancy with offices in Chicago and Brazil, says she knew it was time to bring in high-level help when “we got into a situation where I needed to be able to duplicate myself in order to get everything done.” After documenting her specific pain points, she brought in a director of global insights and innovation in May 2011. “The results have been fantastic,” Sylver says. “She’s a great addition to the team in multiple ways and has helped us grow as a company.”

    4. Business initiatives yield poor results because you’re not an expert in that facet of your business. Brock Blake, co-founder and CEO of Lendio, an online service that helps small businesses find bank loans, says he decided to hire a vice president of marketing about a year ago after realizing that his own marketing initiatives weren’t helping the company meet its goals. “I wasn’t cut out for that job,” Blake concedes. “We were just going in circles.” After a three-month search, Blake found the right person to take the job, and the results, he says, have been phenomenal. “We’ve doubled in size, both in revenue and in our number of employees.”

    5. You’re continually telling customers you can’t meet their needs. “If your customers are constantly asking, ‘Do you have this?’ or ‘Can you do that?’ and the answer is always ‘No, because we don’t have time,’ you’re making a mistake,” Poulos says. One of the advantages of being a small business, he argues, is the ability to act quickly and nimbly to meet customer demand. “The answer to ‘Can we do?’ and ‘Do we make?’” he says, “should almost always be ‘yes.’”

    Making a high-level hire can be intimidating, especially if you’re accustomed to doing everything yourself. But it can also make you happier and more productive, and your business more profitable.

    For more like this to maximize your business growth curve, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”