This is a guest post from Gloria Martinez – see her info below – thanks Gloria.

Growing a business is a significant challenge – especially with how fast the world is changing. One of the critical things a successful business must have these days is an up to date, effective web presence. Here are a few simple, strategic adjustments to your website that could empower your small business to thrive in the face of adversity.

Creating a Loyalty Program

Implementing a loyalty program on your website allows you to recognize and reward repeat customers, nurturing lasting connections. By offering incentives for continued engagement and purchases, you cultivate a dedicated clientele base that not only returns but also becomes brand advocates, boosting both profitability and sustainability in the long run. This strategy not only fosters customer loyalty but also strengthens your brand’s position in the competitive market landscape.

Crafting a Dynamic Website

A visually appealing and user-friendly website is essential for capturing and retaining customer interest. Such a dynamic engagement platform not only enhances user engagement but also allows for quick adaptation to changing market demands and consumer preferences. An engaging, updated website ensures that your small business remains competitive and relevant – even in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Developing a Customer Support Chatbot

Implementing an AI-powered chatbot on your website offers continuous support to customers, guaranteeing immediate responses to inquiries and issues. By enhancing overall customer satisfaction and retention rates, the chatbot elevates the customer experience, fostering loyalty, and releasing essential human resources for core business functions, thus enhancing operational efficiency. This technological solution not only provides timely assistance but also optimizes resource allocation, contributing to long-term business success.

Implementing a Feedback Loop

Creating channels for customers to provide feedback directly on your website facilitates continuous improvement and demonstrates responsiveness to customer needs. By regularly analyzing feedback, you gain valuable insights into areas for enhancement, enabling you to tailor products and services to better meet customer expectations. This proactive approach not only strengthens customer relationships but also drives innovation and business growth.

Fostering a Community Through Blog or Forum

Establishing a platform for customer engagement, such as a blog or forum, cultivates a sense of community around your brand. Encouraging customers to share experiences and insights not only fosters brand loyalty but also enhances credibility and trust. By facilitating meaningful interactions and discussions, you create a vibrant online community that serves as a valuable asset for your small business.

Enhancing Security Measures

Prioritizing the security of customer data and sensitive information is paramount in building trust and confidence among your clientele. Implementing robust cybersecurity protocols mitigates risks associated with online transactions and protects against potential threats such as data breaches and cyber attacks. By ensuring a secure online environment, you safeguard both your reputation and your customers’ privacy, thereby fostering long-term relationships based on trust.

Promoting Time-Sensitive Offers

Featuring time-sensitive promotions on your website creates a sense of urgency and drives immediate action from customers. By leveraging scarcity and exclusivity, you capitalize on consumer behavior and stimulate sales during slow periods. This strategic approach not only boosts short-term revenue but also encourages repeat purchases and customer loyalty over time.

Integrating Responsive Design for Mobile Users

Optimizing your website for seamless browsing across all devices, especially mobile, is essential for reaching and engaging with a diverse audience. With the growing prevalence of mobile devices, prioritizing mobile responsiveness enhances user experience and accessibility, ultimately maximizing engagement and conversion rates. By ensuring that your website is accessible anytime, anywhere, you cater to the evolving needs and preferences of modern consumers.

Improving Homepage Layout

Designing a visually appealing and intuitive homepage layout is crucial for making a positive first impression and guiding visitors through the customer journey. Clearly communicating your value proposition and key offerings ensures that visitors understand the unique benefits of choosing your small business. By optimizing the homepage layout for clarity and ease of navigation, you enhance user experience and increase the likelihood of conversion, ultimately driving business growth and success.

In the face of growing uncertainty, it’s critical that small businesses embrace innovation and adaptability. By harnessing the potential of website adjustments outlined above, businesses can fortify their online presence, nurture customer relationships, and position themselves for sustained success in dynamic markets. Embrace the digital transformation journey and pave the way for a prosperous future.

Gloria Martinez – Gloria started Women Led to celebrate the advancements women have made and inspire women to become entrepreneurs and seek promotions in the workplace. Learn more at Womenled.org

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

This is a guest post from Jill Goodwin – thanks Jill.

“Creativity is one of the last remaining legal ways of gaining an unfair advantage over the competition.” —Ed McCabe

Creativity is not exclusively reserved for artists, photographers, and designers. It’s a critical tool for every business where a problem needs to be solved, or an idea needs to be developed. Creative thinking and ideation are both instruments for innovation, originality, and progress that play indispensable roles in helping business strategists form fresh ideas, overcome unexpected challenges, and become more adaptive thinkers. However, integrating creativity into a business strategy can be a challenge when people aren’t sure exactly what it means or how to tap into the more inventive parts of their thinking process.

These eleven tips can serve as guidelines for inspiring employees to think outside the box, collaborate with each other more effectively, and generate truly original ideas that can set your business apart from the rest.

Offer Flexibility When Possible

Creative ideas can only go so far when strict limitations are imposed on when, where, and how they should be executed. This can be stifling to both creative thinking and the people who are trying to generate fresh ideas.

Offering flexibility when it is feasible is one of the simplest ways to cultivate a more creativity-conducive environment for your team. If shifting around a schedule is what it takes to come up with something truly groundbreaking, it’s definitely a risk worth taking. Great ideas don’t come with a set schedule – so don’t be afraid to open things up when you’re exploring with your team.

Foster A Culture Of Empathy

Empathy is one of the most crucial soft skills for any office to have. It is also a characteristic that underpins lateral thinking. Empathy allows people to step outside of their own heads and get into the minds of others—be they co-workers, consumers, or otherwise. A key aspect of creativity is perspective and empathy is a prime way to find additional perspectives.

Promote Collaboration And Team-Building 

Very rarely is a good idea the result of just one person’s creativity and hard work. Collaboration and team-building are both important for business strategy on a number of levels, and integrating creativity is one of them.

Promote cooperation within the workplace by giving teams frequent opportunities to engage with one another and soundboard different ideas and perspectives to generate ingenuity. Countless studies have shown the benefits of teams spending time together – can you find a way to make that happen more often?

Experiment With Different Ideation Techniques

When it comes to developing a new business strategy or campaign, it can be useful to experiment with different thought processes. These are sometimes referred to as ideation techniques—methodologies you can use to ignite new thoughts and potentialities.

There are many ideation techniques worth trying. Some of the most popular ones include mind mapping, reverse thinking, Brutethink, and rapid ideation.

When you’re stuck in a rut, rotate between different techniques to help spark creativity.

Reward Creative Efforts

When a team or individual harnesses the power of creative thinking and applies it to a real-life problem, reward their efforts. This will not only help motivate and inspire others to do the same but also contribute to an overarching culture of creativity within the workplace.

That includes going so far as finding ways to reward bad ideas – or at least ideas that might not sound great at first glance. The essence of successful brainstorming is building on good and bad ideas. Developing truly innovative strategies will require trying a lot of things – and you want to make sure you’re rewarding the ones that might feel crazy along with the ones that are straightforward.

Hire A Diverse Team Of Individuals

The more diversity there is in your ranks, the more likely your team is to thrive in creativity and innovation. A mixed bag of perspectives, backgrounds, opinions, and voices helps teams become more laterally minded and open to different ways of thinking.

 This is crucial for integrating creativity with business strategy. A truly great strategy needs the mettle and agility that multiple perspectives provide.

Without a healthy, varied chorus of experiences and points of view to draw from, coming up with strategies and plans that can handle the unpredictability of the real world becomes unnecessarily challenging—and not the kind of challenge you need in order to grow.

Break The Cycle Of Monotony

Comfort is the enemy of growth. Don’t allow your teams or strategic processes to become complacent by locking them into the same old routine every day.

Breaking the cycle of monotony by introducing dynamic new experiences is healthy and imperative to the cultivation of creative thought. Host invigorating meetings, take the teams out of the office for a bit of fresh air. Do something different.

Of course, some structure and routine are necessary for a productive business. But the takeaway here is to leave some breathing room for fresh ideas to be liberated.

Prioritize Employee Well-Being

Happy, healthy employees will always be more prone to creativity than burnt-out ones. If you want your team to apply more creativity to business strategy and development, one of the first things to assess is their overall mental and physical well-being.

Tend to those basic needs first in order to lay a solid foundation for creative productivity. Creativity (and productivity) happens when people feel safe, comfortable and energized.

Embrace Clear But Passive Leadership

Strong leadership is vital for every work environment. But sometimes, it’s helpful to step down from the ladder of hierarchy and simply be one of the team. This can help employees lower their defenses and embrace a more inventive state of mind.

Empower your team, set clear expectations, but then get out of the way.

Make Your Work Environment Vibrant

The visual and physical components of a work environment can significantly affect people’s state of mind and mental well-being.

Spruce up your space by incorporating vibrant plants, comfortable furniture, tasteful wall paint colors, and other simple but inspiring decor that can help spur more creative ways of thinking. Studies show that a good-looking workspace also helps with productivity and job satisfaction.

Allow room for a lack of success

Not succeeding is a part of life and, certainly, part of work.

Without the knowledge that failure is acceptable on some level, teams will struggle to open themselves up to truly innovative ways of thinking. In order to integrate creativity into business strategy, there must be some tolerance for ideas that don’t always work out.

Aiming for success should always be the priority, but understanding the value of failure is equally important. As Henry Ford once said, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work.”

Final Thoughts

An artist who sells their work on social media or a photographer who markets themselves using an online portfolio are great examples of combining creativity with business strategy. However, not every business is creative, and not every creative is good at business. However, regardless of the industry, creativity is the driving force behind innovation. Without its presence in your work environment, business strategy can only go so far.

With these tips for integrating creativity with business strategy, you can support your team in the process of discovering new ideas, cooperating more successfully, and breaking outside of industry norms to put your brand on the map.

Jill Goodwin – Content Master & Writer of Amazing Ideas

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

This is a guest post from Gloria Martinez (more info on her at the end) – Thanks Gloria.

Transforming a brilliant idea into a thriving, scalable business takes more than passion and vision. As an aspiring entrepreneur, your path from initial concept to commercial success hinges on strategic planning, continuous learning, and adapting swiftly to changes. Equip yourself with the tools necessary to navigate this complex landscape effectively. Scaling effectively is a mindset and a formula. Adopting these practices can turn your entrepreneurial dreams into tangible, successful realities.

Commit to Thorough Market Research

Start with comprehensive market research to ensure your business idea has a fighting chance in a competitive market. Understand the needs and wants of your potential customers, identify gaps in the current market, and position your business to fill those voids effectively. Analyze market trends, demographic data, and consumer behavior to tailor your offerings. This step isn’t just about knowing your market but mastering it, ensuring your idea is viable and desirable.

Elevate Your Skills with Advanced Education

Returning to school can significantly enhance your business and leadership skills, preparing you to take the helm in your entrepreneurial venture. Pursuing a doctorate in business administration develops advanced skills crucial for positioning yourself as a leader in the business world. Opting for an online degree program offers the flexibility to balance your educational pursuits with ongoing work commitments. Click for more insights into how this can propel your career forward.

Alternatively, there’s also a lot to learn from other successful business owners and professionals. Find a mentor (or a business coach) who can help you learn.

Secure Essential Funding

Capital is the lifeblood of any burgeoning enterprise. Start by identifying your business model’s most suitable funding options, including venture capital, loans, or crowdfunding. Present your well-researched business plan to potential investors to demonstrate the viability and scalability of your business idea. Investors don’t just invest in ideas—they invest in people. Show them why you and your idea are worth their investment. And be clear on how you’re going to execute with that money. There are lots of great ideas out there, but only the ones with the right people and execution actually succeed.

Research Your Competitors

Gaining insight into your competitors is crucial. Study their websites, advertising strategies, product offerings, and pricing structures online. This research helps you identify their strengths and weaknesses and find opportunities where your business can excel. Additionally, conducting customer surveys can provide direct insights into what customers appreciate and dislike about your competitors’ offerings, allowing you to tailor your business to meet market demands better.

Design a Solid Business Plan

Your business plan is the blueprint of your enterprise. It should clearly outline your business goals, strategies, market analysis, funding sources, and operational structure. A well-crafted business plan guides your business operations and communicates your vision to stakeholders and potential investors. This document should be detailed, straightforward, and adaptable, ready to evolve as your business grows. This should be a working document that is concise enough to be useful (and used).

Opt for a Customer-Centric Approach

Today’s market demands that businesses prioritize customer satisfaction and engagement. Develop a customer-centric approach by understanding and anticipating your customers’ needs. Implement systems to gather customer feedback regularly and adapt your products and services accordingly. Remember, a happy customer returns and spreads the word about your business, effectively acting as a free yet powerful marketing tool.

Establish Your Value Proposition

Define what sets your business apart with a compelling value proposition. This statement should clearly illustrate how your product or service addresses customer challenges, enhances their lives, and delivers distinct advantages. Ensure it communicates to your target audience why they should choose your offering over competitors’. Integrating this message into all your marketing materials and pitches will significantly elevate your business’s market appeal. The follow that up by making sure you always live up to that promise.

Wisely Manage Your Cash Flow

Effective cash flow management is essential for the survival and growth of any business. Keep meticulous records of all financial transactions and make informed decisions about when to invest in growth and when to save. Regularly review your costs and revenues, and adjust your budget to prevent financial overextension. Intelligent cash management ensures you have the financial resources to support your business through its various growth stages.

To turn your idea into a scalable business, focus on meticulous strategic planning, continuous education, and swift adaptation to market changes. Engage actively in these processes to equip yourself with the tools for short-term success and long-term growth. The journey from concept to industry leader requires perseverance, innovative thinking, and strategic actions at every step. Embrace this approach as fundamental to ensure your business evolves from an idea into a thriving empire.

Gloria Martinez – Gloria started Women Led to celebrate the advancements women have made and inspire women to become entrepreneurs and seek promotions in the workplace. Learn more at Womenled.org

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

This is a guest post from Gloria Martinez (thanks Gloria)…!

Starting a new business is an exhilarating journey, but landing your first clients can be daunting. One way to over come this is through networking. Leveraging your existing connections can be a powerful strategy. Read on to see how you can effectively use your network to secure your initial clients and set your business on the path to success:

Engage with Your Professional Contacts

One of the most effective ways to land your first clients is by contacting your existing professional contacts. These individuals already understand your work ethic and capabilities. List colleagues, former bosses, or business associates who might benefit from your services.

Send personalized messages explaining your new venture and how it can address their needs. Don’t hesitate to ask if they know others who are also interested. Leveraging these professional relationships can quickly open doors to your first few clients.

Mobilize Your Personal Network

Family and friends can also be invaluable assets in your quest for new clients. Inform them about your business and the services you offer. Communicate what kind of clients you seek and how they can help. Ask them to spread the word within their networks.

The power of word-of-mouth cannot be underestimated, especially when it comes from trusted sources. Encouraging your network to advocate for you can lead to unexpected opportunities and connections.

Collaborate with Local Business Owners

Partnering with a local business owner can be a strategic move to expand your client base and achieve mutual benefits. This works especially well if you are going after the same kind of local customers. To formalize this collaboration, you can use a memorandum of understanding (MOU), a nonbinding agreement detailing each party’s intended actions.

Sometimes referred to as a letter of intent, this document ensures both parties are aligned in their objectives and expectations. By using this approach, you can use this to keep everyone informed and lay a strong foundation for successful cooperation.

Request Referrals

Your existing connections can be a goldmine for referrals. Reach out to them and ask if they can introduce you to potential clients. When requesting referrals, be specific about the type of clients you seek. A direct approach can yield better results than a generic request. It also helps to phrase this as a request for an introduction rather than a referral (it’s a smaller ask).

People are often willing to help, especially if they have confidence in your abilities. This strategy can exponentially increase your reach and bring in pre-qualified clients who are genuinely interested in your services.

Leverage Alumni Networks

Your educational background can be a rich source of potential clients. Tap into alumni networks from your schools or universities. Many institutions have dedicated platforms or social media groups where alumni connect and support each other.

Participate actively in these networks, attend events, and engage in discussions. By positioning yourself as a helpful and knowledgeable community member, you can attract attention and find leads that might convert into clients.

Launch Email Campaign

A well-crafted launch email can create significant buzz around your new business. Draft a comprehensive email detailing your services, the problems you solve, and the value you bring to your clients.

Send this email to your personal and professional contacts. Ensure the email is engaging and includes a clear call to action, such as booking a consultation or visiting your website. A launch email can be an official announcement and help generate immediate interest in your services.

Harness the Power of Social Media

Your social media profiles can be powerful tools for reaching potential clients. Announce your new business on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Share your journey, vision, and the unique value your business offers.

Engage with your audience by posting regular updates, sharing relevant content, and interacting with comments. Social media allows you to reach a wider audience, including people you might not consider potential clients. Being active and visible on these platforms can significantly boost client acquisition efforts.

Final Thoughts

Leveraging your existing connections is a strategic and effective way to secure your first ten clients. By engaging with professional contacts, mobilizing your network, forming partnerships, requesting referrals, tapping into alumni networks, sending launch emails, and utilizing social media, you can create a robust client base for your new business. These methods help you land your first clients and establish a strong foundation for future growth.

Gloria Martinez – Gloria started Women Led to celebrate the advancements women have made and inspire women to become entrepreneurs and seek promotions in the workplace. Learn more at Womenled.org

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

There’s a secret to success that doesn’t get a lot of discussion around entrepreneurs. Doing less. Check out your favorite online guru, thought leader, or growth expert and you’ll likely hear a lot about the importance of ‘hustle’, effort, or hard work. And not without good reason – it takes a lot of work to build a business.

But… that same devotion to long hours will also be your undoing if you really want to scale your business. Seriously, the harder you work at building your business, the more likely you are to hit a wall at some point that you can’t overcome (at least without changing your approach).

Why? Because there are only 24 hours in a day and you are only 1 person. You physically can’t be in 2 places at once and despite your strongly held belief, trying to do multiple things at once (multi-tasking) isn’t making you more productive. As your business grows, more and more things need to get done every day in order to sustain that growth. At some point you will NOT be able to do all of the important things by yourself.

Start Thinking ‘Who’ not ‘How’

According to the internet, Bill Gates once said;

This is a really interesting quote for a couple of reasons. For starters, it’s a great spin on laziness – maybe extra effort isn’t always the best way to go?

The second reason this is interesting is that Gates is clearly thinking ‘Who not How’ because he’s choosing someone else to do the hard job (rather than figure it out himself).

If you’re familiar with the idea of ‘Who not How’ it’s probably because of the famous entrepreneurial coach Dan Sullivan who literally wrote the book on the concept: Who Not How. As you might guess, it’s not a complicated idea, but it can be difficult to consistently put into practice.

If you’re an entrepreneur (or any business executive for that matter), faced with new challenge or problem, it’s likely that your first instinct will be to start thinking about how to solve that problem. You got to where you are because you’re smart and capable and you’ve solved a lot of problems along the way. But even if you can solve the current problem – what you should be thinking instead is who can I find to solve this problem instead of me.

Remember, you only have 24 hours in the day. The more you can offload to other people, the more that can ultimately get done. When you effectively delegate the challenge to someone else, you free up almost all of the time it takes to do that work.

Delegating doesn’t happen in a vacuum

At this point, you might be thinking, this delegation thing is a great idea, but it doesn’t apply to me – I don’t have anyone I can give these hard problems to.

Fair point – especially if you work by yourself or with a small team.

But the bigger idea still holds. If you want to scale your business, or even just get more done, you’re going to have to build a team and you’re going to have to get comfortable with letting go. For starters, there may be some things you’re doing today that you could outsource. Almost every business owner should, at some point, hire someone (or outsource) to do their payroll, bookkeeping, billing and collections.

And as your business continues to grow and you hire new team members, you need to start handing things off. But as part of that hand off, you need to make sure that you’re actually Delegating and not just Deciding. That link has a lot more detail, but the essence is that Deciding means that you just have someone doing tasks but you are still responsible for outcomes and troubleshooting. Delegating means that you are empowering someone else to achieve the outcomes that you want and allowing them the leeway to do that in whatever way works for them.

If you want to scale your business and get more done, you have to stop doing everything.

What can you do now?

Transitioning from doing most of the important work to truly delegating it to others isn’t an easy thing to do. If you already have a strong team around you, then you can start by finding 1 or 2 things that you spend a lot of time on and giving that responsibility to one of your best employees.

But you can’t just throw the work over the wall and hope it all works out. Instead you need to be really clear on what you expect for outcomes, including dates and metrics for success. And you have to let them solve the problem in a way that works for them (which might be different than how you would have solved it). As long as the outcome meets the expectations, then you have to be okay with how they approached it.

And if you don’t have a strong team around you? Then your top priority is to hire someone to be your next ‘Who’. Find something that you spend a lot of time on, that could be done by someone else, and hire towards that challenge.

What do you think? Are you currently trying to do too much? Are you comfortable handing important things off to other people? Or is this something that’s holding you back? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

I recently talked to a business owner who’s done a great job growing their business. They’ve gone from 50 employees to almost 350 in just a few years…! But they are coming up to a common inflection point in terms of growing a business – a point where they have to purposely address how they operate as an owner (and it’s a big change from what got them here).

We talked a bit about how they spend their time – and the business owner used a phrase I don’t hear very often. He talked about how much time he’s been spending as a firefighter over the last few years. I asked him what he meant and the answer is pretty much what you might think – he’s personally swooping in to put out the fires… emergency situations that are impacting the business.

In short, he’s being a Hero – and it’s starting to have an impact on his business (and likely on him as well).

Firefighter? Hero? What’s the problem?

When you’ve owned a business for a long time, especially if it’s a business that you started, then you, the owner, are going to have a huge advantage when it comes to getting stuff done. You’ve likely worked every aspect of the business, you know the details and you know the history. You are likely going to be the most effective at dealing with issues.

But that doesn’t mean you should. Especially as your business grows.

The biggest issue is that you jumping in to save the day isn’t sustainable. As the business grows, so does the need to resolve day to day issues. When the business is big enough, it’s more than a full time job all by itself – and as the owner, you have other critical responsibilities (like leading and managing).

On top of that, you are training your team that they can’t (and shouldn’t try) to solve problems. Instead they should just call you and get out of the way. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how that kind of company culture leads to major issues down the road.

What’s the alternative?

Face it, as a business that’s growing, you’re always going to have issues. Things that need to be handled quickly and cleanly before they impact the entire business in a negative way.

Here are a couple of things that can help keep the fires contained:

Boring but critical – Processes and Procedures

One of the things that happens when a business grows quickly is that things start getting handled in ‘expedited’ ways. You and your team don’t always have time to figure out the best way to do something, so you end up doing something that works for now (good enough) and you move on to the next challenge.

And then, when that situation comes up again… you don’t remember how you handled it last time so you do something different. Maybe that works as well, or maybe it ends up creating some ripple effects that have to be handled down the line. Either way, continually solving challenges on the fly takes a lot more effort and time than if you had a clear cut, proven approach.

I have a client in manufacturing, and they’ve learned the important, but painful lesson that they can’t afford to be too accommodating to clients when it comes to special orders. It’s not that they can’t customize a product, they can and they have, but every time they do, it shuts down almost all the other work they’re doing and puts everything else on hold.

As a way to combat that, they now have a process that starts with sales that makes it very difficult to special order a product. The result is that they have a lot fewer fires to put out in the shop…

Having documented, consistent ways of doing things makes it a lot easier to do more.

Even more important… Get out of the Way!

The other big thing you need to focus on as an owner is building a great team that has the time, expertise and most importantly, the authority to handle fires when they come up (without you)!

I’ve talked before about the importance of Delegating versus Deciding – deciding is assigning tasks to others, but keeping the overall responsibility for the outcome for yourself. Delegating, on the other hand, is when you truly empower someone on your team to own the outcome that you’re looking for – including handling things if and when they go wrong.

A great example of this comes from Tim Ferriss’s book The 4 Hour Work Week where he talks about empowering his customer service reps to handle customer complaints as they saw fit as long as it was less than a $200 impact. The outcome from that approach was a drastic reduction of customer service issues that were escalated to the owner.

If you want to free up your time to deal with the big picture stuff (which only you can do), you have to let other people take on responsibility for getting stuff done and solving problems.

Not easy, but necessary if you want to grow…

Implementing solid processes and policies takes time and will initially feel like a waste of time. You (or your team) could just get the work done and move on to the next thing. But that’s not going to help you when the same (or similar) challenge comes up again in a few weeks. Solid processes however, will make a huge difference down the line if you make the investment.

Likewise, the idea of empowering an employee to handle things that have a direct impact on the core of your business (financial or otherwise) is a scary proposition.

• You have to hire the right kind of people – the ones who believe in what you believe in.
• You have to take the time to train them and clearly set expectations for what’s needed.
• Hardest of all, you have to be able to step back and let them take over… even if (or especially if) they are going to make mistakes or at least not do it the exact way you would do it.

The business owner I was talking to was shooting to cut down his firefighting time to 10% (which is still a 1/2 day per week). Directionally that’s a great start and a worthwhile target – and it helps him set his priorities for the year… focus on creating and implementing solid processes and hiring and empowering key leaders.

It’s a lot of work, but considering this guy’s track record, I’m sure it’s a transition he’ll be able to make.

What about you? How much time do you spending fighting fires in your business? Have you attempted to get in front of it and find a way to reduce the fires? What are you working on? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

I had a great discussion with a new entrepreneur last week – he’s been working a few side hustles for a while, but after 2 years of thinking and planning, he’s ready to launch a new stand-alone business. Every business (and start-up) is different, but as we were talking, 3 key points came up that would apply to any new launch (even if you’re an existing business).

If you’re going to the effort and expense of putting something new out into the world, you hopefully have a pretty good feel for the marketplace that you’re getting into. You know the competition, you have a pretty good idea of what people want (in your space) and at least a rough idea of what they would be willing to pay for it.

But the reality is that we don’t know what we don’t know – which is why this first point is so important.

If Possible, Start Small…

This isn’t a new idea – Eric Ries published The Lean Startup back in 2011 and one of the big ideas in that book is the concept of launching with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Essentially Ries asks the question; ‘What is the smallest version of your product, service or business that you could launch that still generally fulfills what you’re trying to accomplish?’.

A similar idea from Jim Collins excellent book Great By Choice (his follow up to Good to Great) is the importance of the idea to ‘Fire Bullets then Cannonballs’. He calls it Empirical Creativity and based on his extensive research, it’s one of the key factors that enabled the companies in his study to grow by 10X more than their competitors. Try something small (bullet) before you invest in something big (cannonball).

Bottom line – the best way to learn is to run multiple, smaller experiments. Not only is is easier and faster to learn this way, but from a practical perspective, it’s much more cost effective. If you build out a fully fleshed out product that’s ‘complete’, it’s going to cost a lot more to launch – and without any real world data or experience, it’s likely that you will miss the mark somewhere along the way.

Make Sure Your Idea Makes Money – Early and At Scale

The second idea seems pretty obvious, but there are a lot of entrepreneurs that kind of gloss over this one. Unless you’re launching a non-profit, one of the core principles of business is the need to make a profit. But often the excitement of getting a new product, service or idea out to the world overshadows the practical, profit angle.

To be fair, the quickest way to get feedback is to give away your new product or service (or make it really cheap). And there is a (limited) place for that approach. But the reality is that if you launch something at below cost then you’re not accurately modeling market demand.

There’s an argument to be made in some cases that costs will drop substantially when the new offering is sold at scale. Which could lead to a long term viable strategy of taking a loss in order to build up enough demand to hit the scale needed to actually make money. Not a great approach for most startups that don’t have a lot of money – can you survive long enough to get to break even? Also… wouldn’t you rather just make more money once you start to scale?

Ideally it would be great to make at least a 10% profit per unit (after all your overhead / fixed costs) from day one – shooting for more as you scale.

Have a Workable Plan for Ramping Up – Before You Need It

The third idea to think through before you launch is to have a clear idea of how you’re going to be able to ramp up your production when the demand for your new dream really starts kicking in.

Sometimes with a startup, there’s a strong push to just get something launched, even if it means doing a lot of stuff manually just to make it work. And considering the idea of starting small (see above), there are benefits to that approach.

But the whole point of launching something new is because you want it to succeed and that you want people clamoring to buy. To that end, it’s important to at least have solid ideas on how you could deliver beyond that initial small start. What would it take to deliver at 10X your starting capacity?

The most likely version of this challenge often centers around the unique skillset of the entrepreneur. If your business plan is centered around the idea that you are the only person who can do X, Y, or Z in the delivery of your product or service, then you’re going to run into a wall if you’re successful.

Realistically a founder will have to do most of the work just to get started. But the plan shouldn’t require any ‘unique’ skillsets that couldn’t easily be served by outsourcing or hiring.

Congratulations on Your Entrepreneurial Dream…

We need people who want to build things, who want to launch things… and those are rarer than they should be. But success requires going beyond the dream – and that’s where these ideas come into play.

• Start Small: Can you create an experiment to test your idea in the marketplace?
• Make Money from the Start: How quickly can you reach financial break-even?
• Have a Plan to Scale: Who can you enlist to do the work once your idea takes off?

What do you think? If you’re thinking about launching something, do these ideas resonate with you? It’s not a complete list – so what did I miss? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

As a business owner, do you ever feel like you’re treading water? Or worse, actually losing ground? Some of that might be due to challenges in the marketplace, but more than likely it’s an impact of not having the right people on your team… or to put it another way, not having a team that’s fully engaged.

For more than 20 years, the Gallup organization has been surveying employees of businesses big and small to determine how ‘engaged’ they are with their employer. And for more than 20 years, those numbers have painted a pretty grim picture:

• Approximately 1/3 of employees are actively engaged – doing whatever they can to make the company succeed.
• Almost 20% of employees are actively disengaged (meaning they are working against the company).
• The rest of the employees are pretty much just showing up and doing what they have to do to keep their job.

The numbers have fluctuated a bit over the years – in the last 10 years they started to show improvement, but since Covid the engaged numbers are declining and the actively disengaged numbers are climbing.

As you might imagine, businesses with higher engagement tend to perform better (estimated 20% improvement in productivity) and have much higher employee retention. Which drives real financial benefits to the bottom line.

It’s an important thing to focus on, but what can you do to improve the numbers?

How to Improve Engagement? Replace Managers with Coaches?

An article in Fortune magazine earlier this summer got some buzz by profiling a company that replaced all of their managers with coaches as a direct strategy to improve employee engagement. The company is Time Etc. a virtual assistant provider in the US. According to the CEO (who wrote the article), the idea came from the novel approach of asking their employees what they needed from their managers. The responses primarily focused on things like feedback, goal setting, personal and professional development opportunities and autonomy. Which sounded more like things coaches do rather than traditional managers.

From the article:

“Our coaches have one, very clear, job to do: to help our employees be as productive as possible and, in doing so, achieve more. They offer close mentoring and feedback, encourage employees to identify how they work best, and make sure they are offered training and support to develop professionally.”

Time Etc. CEO Barnaby Lashbrooke

The outcome so far? Performance on key goals improved by 20%, less turnover, fewer sick days and employees are much happier. It’s hard to argue with that kind of success… at least for this company.

Should you replace your managers with coaches?

Improving employee engagement is definitely a worthwhile goal – arguably it’s one of the most impactful things a business could do in terms of improvements. But that doesn’t mean that this approach of replacing managers with coaches is the right move for everyone. I can see at least a couple of problems with this approach:

Problem #1 – there’s a lot of impact and expense with getting rid of your managers… and then being able to hire competent coaches in their place. *Note – I’m assuming that the article is literally suggesting that the old managers were fired and new coaches were hired. That may not be the case – but if so, that’s a pretty big, expensive leap.

Problem #2 – Coaching is great, but good managers also bring a lot of important skills and traits to a business. A great manager will direct their team, helping them coordinate, communicate and prioritize the work that needs to be done. If you have a team of purely independent workers (like a team of independent Virtual Assistants) then you may not need most of those management traits. But if you have a team that has to work together and work with others, then management… and leadership are going to be very important.

A more viable alternative? Managers that Coach…!

For a lot of business owners, a more viable and practical approach to this idea would be to work with your managers on incorporating a coaching leadership style into their day to day efforts. The idea would be to generate a focus of developing team members as a top priority (right up there with getting the work done). This takes time and energy, but it also leads to a more productive, creative and happier team.

One practical way to incorporate this idea is to leverage the practical framework from the book The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. Overall the framework starts with the need for managers to recognize that they have to change their mindset from always answering questions to starting to ask questions.

Beyond that, as a leader, one of your key goals should be developing your team members – finding ways to make them better.  Effective coaching is one of the best ways to do that. In the business world, leaders and managers are typically taught (and excel) at giving advice and giving answers. And while there will always be a place for that, effective coaching requires you to focus on asking more questions and letting others find their own way. It’s a skill that’s surprisingly difficult to pick-up, even though it requires less effort and thought once you really become good at it.

The book focuses on 7 questions that managers can use to start coaching their team members. To do this effectively you need to mindset shift mentioned above and you need to invest the time to have regular, focused 1 on 1 discussions… and you need to be comfortable letting your employees find their own answers.

What do you think? Does it make sense to replace managers with coaches in your world? Or would you be better off having your current managers incorporate a coaching leadership style into what they do? Or is all of this unnecessary? We’d love to hear your thoughts – leave a comment below.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

Leadership is hard. Most would agree that the single biggest key to succeeding in business is having a great team… and a great team starts with leadership, but after that it gets fuzzy.

What does it really take to be a great leader?

Is it being charismatic and communicating well (and frequently)?

Is it being a great visionary and having a clear picture of where you’re going (short term and long term)?

Is it being approachable and relatable and having your team’s trust? Honestly caring about them?

Is it supporting your team so they can do their best work?

Arguably it’s all of the above. In Gino Wickman’s book ‘How to be a Great Boss’ he makes a strong case for the following:

“A great boss creates a work environment where people are fully engaged and highly accountable.”

We’re nibbling around the edges of this challenge, but it would still help to have some more discrete ideas on HOW to be a great boss / leader.

Start with Employee Engagement

Another way to look at this is in terms of Employee Engagement. I was recently reminded of this by an article in Inc. Magazine – Why You Can’t Buy Employee Engagement by Bill Fotsch. He starts the article by pointing out that the Gallup Organization created a comprehensive way to measure employee engagement more than 30 years ago. They came up with 12 questions that do a solid job of indicating if an organization has engaged employees.

The initial outcome, from 30 years ago, is that only about 30% of the workforce feels engaged… and that percentage hasn’t really changed since then. The good news is that there’s plenty of room for improvement.

Questions that indicate employee engagement…

Here’s a list of the 12 Questions from Gallup (the Gallup Q12).

1. I know what is expected of me at work.
2. I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
3. At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
4. In the past seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
5. My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
6. There is someone at work who encourages my development.
7. At work, my opinions seem to count.
8. The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
9. My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
10. I have a best friend at work.
11. In the past six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
12. This past year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

Overall it’s a pretty straightforward list and it seems pretty simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy. Gallup (and lots of others) have done years of study to validate this list of questions and if your team generally scores well (strongly agrees) with these questions, then it’s pretty safe to assume that you have an engaged team and solid leadership.

How does this apply to improving leadership?

To make this more practical and tangible, you need to do something with it. I’m sure Gallup (and other companies) would be glad to work with you to survey your team and figure out next steps. And that might be a great idea.

But you could also start by reviewing this list of questions and start brainstorming ways to address it within your team or your company. You could start by asking your team what they think… or if you already know that you fall short on some of these, then you can start implementing some new ideas that would likely lead to more positive answers in your environment.

Does everyone on the team really know what’s expected of them at work? When’s the last time you addressed expectations – not only on what they should be doing, but what’s acceptable in terms of an outcome?

I talked with a client of mine the other day and they shared that they’ve been really frustrated lately because things aren’t getting done when they expect. When I asked if they had shared those specific dates and outcomes, it was clear that at least part of the problem was a lack of communication.

On a similar note, when’s the last time you, as the leader, recognized each of your team members for positive contributions? If it’s not a regular ongoing thing, it doesn’t really count.

Does this engagement / leadership stuff really matter?

As I mentioned before, the list of 12 questions from Gallup are pretty straightforward. The concept’s not difficult to understand… but it’s definitely not easy to truly incorporate. You have to evolve an overall culture that supports all of these ideas on a consistent basis. And for most organizations, that’s a tall order.

And does it really matter all that much? Obviously engaged employees are happier and enjoy what they’re doing – but does that really translate to anything important?

According to a recent study by Happy Or Not they found the following:

Highly engaged employees lead to increased productivity, improved performance, higher profitability, better customer satisfaction, lower absenteeism, reduced turnover, and a positive work environment. They also contribute to the overall success and growth of the organization. 

And in case you’re wondering, these studies have found that the average improvement on Profitability is 21% and Productivity is 17%. Even ignoring the touchy-feely happy employee stuff, that seems like a worthwhile outcome to pursue!

What do you think? Are your employees engaged? Are you consistently leading your team in a positive way? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach

This is a guest post from Jill Goodwin (see bio below) – Thanks Jill…!

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”—Anais Nin

Fearless leadership is something most people can look up to.

Whether it’s the warriors venerated in our history books or scientists who push the limits of human understanding, men and women who take chances and stand tall in the face of opposition are celebrated by society.

But how does that translate to business?

Business is a game of risk. Pushing standards and competing with other companies is what drives innovation—the innovation that serves both the consumer and the corporation. In this way, business people are our modern-day icons, whether they’re more traditionalist do-gooders or widely celebrated anti-heroes.

If you feel that you can conquer your doubts and run your business without fear, you’re on track to accomplishing what very few will ever accomplish in their lifetimes.

In this article, we’ll cover how to approach your business dealings, how to bring a star-studded team together, as well as when it’s necessary to take on a more calculated approach. But first, what does a fearless businessperson look like?

A Fearless Approach To Business Leadership

Running a business fearlessly necessitates an unyielding determination to shatter barriers and push boundaries. It requires embracing uncertainty as a catalyst for growth rather than a hindrance. To be fearless is to chart uncharted territories, challenge conventional wisdom, and navigate uncharted waters with resolve.

Approaching your business dealings with fearlessness means embracing calculated risks and making bold decisions. It means thinking beyond the confines of comfort and convention, envisioning possibilities that others might overlook. This mindset empowers leaders to grasp opportunities that others may dismiss, propelling their organizations forward when others stumble.

Building a Fierce Team (A Step-By-Step Guide)

1. Clarify Your Vision

Before you embark on the journey of building a fierce team, it’s essential to have a clear vision in mind.

Define your organization’s mission, values, and long-term goals. Articulate the purpose that will ignite passion and resonate with potential team members. A strong vision serves as a guiding light, attracting individuals who align with your aspirations and fueling the fire of collective ambition.

2. Identify Key Competencies

To build a fierce team, identify the key competencies required to achieve your vision. Assess the skills, knowledge, and expertise needed to excel in your industry.

Seek individuals who possess a diverse range of talents, including problem-solving, creativity, adaptability, and leadership. Look beyond the surface and recognize the potential for growth and learning in potential team members.

3. Embrace Diversity

Diversity is the cornerstone of a fierce team. Embrace individuals from different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.

Cultivating a diverse team brings together a multitude of ideas, sparking innovation and enabling dynamic problem-solving. Encourage an inclusive environment that values and respects the unique contributions each team member brings to the table.

4. Recruit Fearlessly

When recruiting for your fierce team, think outside the box. Cast a wide net and seek talent beyond traditional channels. Leverage social media platforms, industry events, and networking opportunities to connect with individuals who possess the skills and mindset you desire.

Look for candidates who exhibit passion, drive and a hunger for growth.

Remember, building a fierce team is not solely about impressive resumes but also about finding individuals who embody your organization’s values.

5. Foster Collaboration

Fierce teams thrive on collaboration. Create an environment that encourages open communication, trust, and respect among team members. Establish channels for idea sharing, feedback, and constructive criticism.

Encourage cross-functional collaboration, allowing diverse perspectives to merge and enrich decision-making processes. Foster a culture where every team member feels empowered to contribute their unique insights and expertise.

6. Cultivate Leadership

A fierce team comprises not only followers but also leaders. Encourage and nurture leadership skills within your team members. Provide opportunities for growth, mentorship, and professional development. Empower individuals to take ownership of their projects and initiatives.

Fostering leadership within your team creates a self-sustaining ecosystem of high performers who drive the organization forward.

7. Promote a Fearless Mindset

To build a fierce team, instill a fearless mindset among your members. Encourage calculated risk-taking, innovation, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. Emphasize the importance of learning from failures and embracing setbacks as opportunities for growth. Celebrate resilience, perseverance, and the courage to push beyond boundaries. Celebrate failure.

By nurturing a fearless mindset, you cultivate a team that is unafraid to seize opportunities and surmount obstacles.

8. Nurture a Positive Culture

Culture plays a pivotal role in fostering a fierce team. Create a positive and supportive work environment where team members feel valued, recognized, and motivated. Foster a culture of accountability, transparency, and mutual respect.

Celebrate achievements and milestones, both big and small. Encourage work-life balance and well-being, recognizing that a happy and fulfilled team is a productive one.

9. Continual Evaluation and Development

Building a fierce team is an ongoing process. Continually evaluate the performance and dynamics of your team. Provide regular feedback and performance assessments to foster growth and improvement.

Offer development opportunities to sharpen skills and expand knowledge. Encourage a culture of continuous learning where team members are inspired to evolve and adapt to new challenges.

10. Lead by Example

As the leader of your fierce team, lead by example. Demonstrate the fearlessness, dedication, and passion you expect from your team members. Be accessible, approachable, and transparent. Show appreciation for their efforts and provide guidance when needed.

Your own leadership sets the tone for the team, inspiring them to embody the same fierce spirit that fuels your organization’s success.

Taming the Beast

While fearlessness is often celebrated when you do things like invest in stocks and look for the quick win, there are instances in business when a slower and more calculated approach can be equally effective. As a business owner, recognizing when there’s a need for balance and strategic decision-making is crucial.

In certain situations, such as when navigating complex regulatory landscapes, entering unfamiliar markets, or undertaking significant investments, a measured approach allows for meticulous analysis, risk mitigation, and informed decision-making. It’s during these moments that taking the time to gather data, conduct thorough market research, and consult with experts can provide valuable insights and increase the likelihood of long-term success.

Moreover, embracing a slower and more calculated approach demonstrates wisdom, prudence, and the ability to adapt to the unique challenges that arise in the ever-evolving business landscape.

A Last Word

So there you have it folks: how to build a business that cannot be tamed. Now get out there and go wild!

Jill Goodwin – Content Master & Writer of Amazing Ideas

Shawn Kinkade Kansas City Business Coach