Directis was founded in September 2003 in Vancouver, BC. The original business plan states that our mission would be:

To make small businesses in BC more successful by helping them translate “best practices” in management theory into ideas and practices that make sense in a small business environment.

In Vancouver, our services spanned a broad spectrum, including human resources/recruiting, marketing, financial management and strategic planning.  In January 2008, Directis relocated to Victoria BC. After a brief period of adjustment, the company has focused more narrowly on strategic planning for not-for-profit and small business organizations.

Over the years, Directis has varied in size from one to five consultants, and in 2012 Stacey Mitchell quietly joined the group.  At the same time, Sue was feeling a personal need to shift her professional career, with a strong desire to work with a community focused organization.

Being the strategic planners that we are, a plan was hatched, where Stacey moved first into a leadership role, and in May 2013 took full control of Directis.

Since May, lots of work has been going on behind the scene – many mind maps have been drawn, our vision and mission has been refreshed, our business model has been tweaked and retweaked, our services have been revised, and our branding and website are currently being updated.

As leader of the organization, I would like to share a little bit about those changes.  The vision and intention of Directis Consulting Group is to create a group of dynamic professionals, with varied and strong skills that will assist our clients be strategic about how they run and maintain their small organizations.

We are shifting our approach closer to that experienced when we were established in Vancouver.

Our new Mission Statement is:

To help small organizations and their leaders reach ultimate success

through focusing on and providing space for strategic decisions and actions.

Our Core Values are:

Authenticity, Creativity, Respect, Balance, Passion, and Vision

Services:

To allow our organization to grow and best serve our clients, we’ve divided our services into three areas:

• Consulting and Coaching  – Let us be your expert voice on subjects such as strategic planning, business planning, human resources, organizational change, marketing, and financial management.  We work with the leaders in organizations, listening to the challenges and desires you have for your group, and then helping devise the best actions to take.  We also offer business coaching for leaders needing more personalized support.

• Facilitation and Workshops – Throughout the year we will offer a set of subject specific workshops specifically targeted to leaders of small organizations.  We are also experienced in group facilitation, and workshop design that can be customized to our client’s needs.

• Business Services – To help ensure that small organizations are able to focus on strategic actions, we are offering administrative support services.  These services are tailored for our clients, whether it is by helping you with a service launch, scheduling, managing emails, writing documents, managing social media, or event management.

Lots of great things are underway!  As we near the end of 2013, you’ll be seeing a refreshed approach to our social media, new branding and a client friendly website.  We’ll also be re-launching our newsletter, and introducing new team members.

In the meantime, we would love to speak with you about how we can assist your small organization.

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March 18, 2013 – VICTORIA, BC – A recent study of Employment Program BC (EPBC) service providers shows the funding model and tracking software implemented last year has reduced service quality for vulnerable job-seekers.

“The focus on fee-for-service billing doesn’t allow organizations to adapt their services to the clients’ needs. Job-seekers’ needs are expected to conform to what the government thinks they should be paying for,” says Susan Low, principal consultant of Directis Consulting Group, one of the two consulting firms which authored the study.

Since April 2012, the Employment Program of British Columbia (EPBC) has been administered by contracted agencies across the province. In turn, each of these agencies subcontracts a variety of organizations to deliver a range of community based employment related services. Funding of services and case management of jobseekers is done through software called Integrated Case Management.

On Vancouver Island, contracting for EPBC is administered by eight agencies. As of March 2012, the eight agencies had subcontracted 71 organizations to provide employment services across the island. Directis Consulting Group and Development Action conducted an anonymous online survey of the subcontracting agencies. The survey asked directors of these programs to comment on how the EPBC’s new funding model and Integrated Case Management software has affected how these organizations are able to help job-seekers.

“88% of respondents listed the change in EPBC as having a negative or somewhat negative impact on their ability to help people access employment,” points out Lee Sentes, director of Development Action which partnered on the survey. “0% said it was having a positive impact.  It is therefore difficult to see how EPBC will meet its intended outcome.  We really hope all parties can sit around a table and constructively work these issues out.”

The report of the survey responses can be read online:

• Executive Summary – http://www.developmentaction.ca/assets/EPBC-exec-report.pdf
• Full Report – http://www.developmentaction.ca/assets/EPBC-full-report.pdf

Directis Consulting Group and Development Action are consulting firms that work with non-profit organizations in a range of sectors. The survey was independently initiated, authored and administered to explore the impact of the EPBC on subcontracting organizations.

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This disconnection can show up when managers, staff or volunteers feel a lack of engagement with the organization, which leads to them leaving to work elsewhere, where they are more engaged. It can also show up in what seems to be performance issues and not getting the work done. Either way, when a senior person leaves your team, it’s a good time to ask whether the direction of the organization is clearly articulated and shared by all. And THAT can lead to asking, “should we be doing strategic planning?”

If somebody has just departed your team, the next question is whether you should hire their replacement before you do this strategic planning.

There are a few reasons to support hiring before planning: most commonly, people want to have the buy-in of all the important players on the team with a strategy so they will hire and then do planning. It could be that operational requirements demand the replacement of a key person, and until the gap is filled the organization will be in crisis mode; never a good time to allocate time and resources to strategic planning.

However, there are also good reasons to hold off on hiring a new person (even a CEO or senior manager) until the organization’s strategy has been updated and clarified. First of all, the direction of the strategy may call for specific skill sets in a role, which can be incorporated into the search for the new hire. If you simply hire a replacement for the previous departed person, you may in fact be repeating the shortfalls that were hampering performance in the past. Also, consider that any new hire will come in with plenty of new ideas, but lacking wisdom about the organization’s context that may inform or limit strategic options. Strategic planning and employee orientation do not go hand in hand. The refrain becomes “I don’t know enough about the organization yet to be of value to this conversation” which detracts from the effective spirit of the planning group.

If you do decide that operational requirements demand a hire, consider making it an “Acting” hire, effective until the strategic planning process reveals what skills or resources the organization will need in its new direction. Or postpone your strategic planning until a suitable orientation period has been completed and make sure the new team member’s orientation includes meeting with as many stakeholders as possible, to give them an opportunity to immerse themselves in the strategic context of the organization.

Have you recently replaced or added a senior management team member? Did it have an impact on strategic planning? Please share your experience in the comments!

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“Talk to the duck” is an apocryphal story about a manager who was tired of having his employees continually come to him with problems that they could have solved for themselves. (Sound familiar?) After putting up with this and trying various things to get employees to problem-solve, the manager eventually got a yellow rubber duck and gave it to one employee, with the instructions that whenever a problem arose, the employee was to “talk to the duck” to explain the problem first. The result was that as the employee talked out the problem, he discovered related causes and possible solutions that hadn’t occurred to him originally.

There is apparently an application of this for programmers, called “rubber duck debugging.” I think it’s a really nifty idea and, I might add, a fabulous excuse to keep a rubber duck in your office. In fact, I think I’m going to head down to Zydeco this afternoon and grab a few duckies – one for my desk, and a few to give away.

If you’re struggling with employees who don’t seem to think for themselves, drop me a line with your number – I’ll be YOUR rubber duck and then I’ll hook you up with one for your staff.

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Here at Directis, we get a lot of ideas. They seem to grow here in the office with its three large whiteboards, wide coffee table and comfy couch. Two of the ideas that have been stirring over the past months:

The Marketing Onion

This conceptualization of integrated marketing came about initially over two years ago as I tried to explain to myself and then a colleague how social media combines with traditional marketing techniques, based on a foundation of a sales process. There are layers (hence the “onion” metaphor) leading a new customer or donor or volunteer into the heart of your organization to where you get the core purpose of your engagement – a sales transaction, a donation, a commitment of some kind.

Bringing the onion to the world is proving to be a challenge. I made a video of myself explaining it last summer but the lighting and sound were not up to par (because we had no real video equipment or sound equipment to use!). I’m still working on the graphic – I can draw it for you in a flash but every time I try to scan it, the results are not pretty! The Marketing Onion came up again yesterday in conversation with some new friends and we’re going to try to work out some way to bring it to the wider world.

The Non-Profit Sweet Spot

Improvising off Alex Glassey’s Sweet Spot concept in the StratPad app for business, I created a non-profit Sweet Spot. It’s a Venn diagram which shows how funder interest/willingness, your organization’s activities and other organizations’ activities interact within a framework of societal needs. There WILL be a good graphic of this to share with you as soon as StratPad NonProfit hits the App Store, which will be sometime this summer (fingers crossed that the technical pipeline hits no more obstacles). I was just talking with a friend about this concept this morning and realized I want to do a lot more work on it.

Do you ever grow anything in the garden of your mind? What are your ideas?

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The first thing that went wrong was the robo-call. My caller ID identified the call as coming from RBC, so I answered it with my customary cheer (it’s always good to sound cheerful when your bank calls you). However it wasn’t a person on the other end of the phone. It was a computerized voice saying “This is a personal and business account manager calling you …” blah blah blah and quite frankly I’m not sure what else was said right off the bat, because I was busy being offended that a computer would say it was a human being and expect me not to notice. Then the same message was repeated in French, even though my bank records clearly indicate my preferred language of communication is English. THEN I was put on hold. Yep, they called ME and put me on hold to talk to a real person. 

I was preparing myself to tell the caller (once I got to speak to a real person) how unimpressed I was that my bank’s employees can’t be bothered to dial my phone number personally, but then the insult was taken to a whole new level. The person on the other end of the line, who identified himself as “Steve,” asked to speak to my husband. Well, I can only assume he was trying to speak to my husband but he mispronounced the name rather appallingly. And that’s when I flew off the handle.

You see, my husband is a minority shareholder of this company of mine. He does not and has never made any banking decisions regarding this company. He doesn’t even have signing authority, nor is he even a director of the company. As far as his legal rights go where this company is concerned, he’s allowed to say “thank you very much for the dividend cheque, honey” and bring me a glass of wine. I’m not even sure why the bank has him on record with my bank account. Especially after the last episode.

Last year, in April or so, I applied for and received a credit line with this bank. In their wisdom, they issued my husband’s credit card… before issuing mine, in fact. I did not ask for my husband to receive a credit card. I most distinctly don’t want him to have one, since he’s not involved with the business in any way. I recall making quite a fuss with my account manager at the time that the card arrived for my husband before my own arrived. I distinctly told them not to address ANY correspondence, calls or any sort of communication whatsoever to my husband.

It’s not that I don’t like my husband. I just hate it that the bank assumes, repeatedly, that when there is a man’s name and a woman’s name listed on an account (and for the life of me I can’t figure out why, after the last episode, his name is still on the account), they will blindly assume that the man is the one in charge of things. You know, perhaps I could forgive this if my husband had signing authority. But he doesn’t. Perhaps if he were on the board of directors, I would shrug it off. But he isn’t. All he has going for him is being alphabetically first on the listing, but after 9 years of doing business with RBC, I think I’ve earned the right to have it specified on my banking record that I AM THE BOSS.

Perhaps I am being overly sensitive about the matter. However, it illustrates the key point I want to make by sharing this story: know thy customers, and use thy knowledge. If you’re going to gather a bunch of data about your customers and store it in a database, do everybody a favour and use it. Why am I being addressed in French when I clearly don’t speak or understand that language? And I know they know that, because they have a relationship with me, and they have a little language flag in their customer database, and they ask me from time to time what my preferred language is. They know who’s allowed to sign the cheques. Why call and ask to speak a person who has no banking authority whatsoever?

If you don’t have information about prospective customers, you can be forgiven for not customizing things to the nth degree. But when you do have that information, and you have a relationship with your customers, don’t insult them by ignoring that information.

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Sustainability = capacity to endure
Interconnectedness – systems thinking
The world is experiencing an acceleration of change.
MEC looked at the demographics – new choices of product and messages for focusing on women and Asians – people with money and time to play.

We are faced with colliding facts just like early explorers learning the earth is not flat.

Do you know where the water comes from for the materials to make your product? e.g water for rivers in sewing factory areas comes from Tibetan Plateau – glaciers are receding drastically.

The speed of fragmentation has increased. The system is interconnected though so there is a lot of stuff “you don’t know that you don’t know” about what is going on upline from you.

Colliding facts – we don’t control our brand and we get very little time to explain ourselves. Actions have to speak louder than words. The biggest risk you have in your business is the gap between what you say and what you really do.

Is this sustainability or is this just good business?

Technology revolution is changing things – the younger generation wants to know the purpose behind your business. Just making money is no longer acceptable to the new generation of buyers. Immense power is in the hand of the buyers.

Generations view sustainability differently. Young generation wants to be able to trust the brands they buy. Over 45 – protecting the planet. 25-45 – having healthy communities to live in. under 25: fair wages, safe working conditions, human(e) rights. You have to provide these things to consumers and staff.

It does not get less complicated.

Capacity to endure – inefficiency is not just wasteful – it costs money now and it will cost more in the future. Business leaders see this, they are accepting the fact that government is not going to take the lead.

Change – it’s neither good nor bad. It is what it is. What is your capacity to endure?

Where do your impacts lie? Who are your stakeholders? Will they give you license to operate in their communities in 5 years time? What are the gaps between what you say and what you actually do?

Where do your risks and opportunities lie in a 10 year timeline?

What are you going to do?

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Thanks for your work Susan.  Like I said to you at the meeting, that was one of the very few SAPs that I’ve actually felt like we accomplished what we set out to do.  Your skill at being able to keep the discussions on task were invaluable.  Really looking forward to working with you again!

We’re excited about working with the College too. Biologists are fun!

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Here are some of the topics I’ve been researching and working on this week:

• industry research – getting to know the lay of the land in two new industries where I have customers or prospects, so I can respond intelligently to their business challenges and opportunities.
• business governance (as opposed to non-profit governance) – finding ways to translate “corporate” governance models from the land of the Fortune 500 to family businesses or just small businesses.
• Certified Management Consultant designation – I have started compiling engagement summaries from the past few years to present my qualifications for the CMC designation.
• Appreciative Inquiry as a basis for strategic planning – if you got my newsletter you read the article about building from your strengths.

I’ve been a busy little beaver! I know that in a couple of months it will be time for my annual Birthday strategic planning retreat, so I’m also looking at my strat plan and reflecting on what’s been done, what is outstanding and what became irrelevant as the year wore on and things evolved. In short, I’m doing outstandingly well on my goals and there will be some key strategic decisions to make this summer about how I take it onwards from here.

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The article brings up the subject of how much money companies may (or may not) be spending on social media, and the fact that there are apparently companies popping up whose market offering is their expertise in measuring the effectiveness of social-video advertising.

Frankly, I think that anyone who purports to give you an adequate measure of the “effectiveness” of your social media is pulling one over on you. I have yet to see a reasonably disciplined, reliable and valid method of demonstrating the value of social media and, many experts have opined, on marketing as a whole. There’s the old nugget “we know that 50% of our marketing is working; we just don’t know which 50%.”

I am open to being corrected, but I think that consultants claiming to show you ROI on your social media budget (counting both time and money) are going to, at best, describe some qualitative signs that your brand perception has shifted. Hopefully they will have a sample size of customers that is statistically significant, and they will have employed some kind of valid research techniques including control groups etc. to tell you that there is a causal relationship between your social media activities and increases in your revenue. Because frankly, having people “feel good” about your company isn’t worth diddly-squat until it translates into dollars paid. From what I’ve seen, most social media practitioners/consultants are unable to make that link conclusively.

I’m not advocating for people to ditch their social media, just that they not fool themselves that it is a speculative and unproven thing to spend your money on. Back there in business school we were taught to look at what the ROI and “return period” is for an investment, and decide what is a reasonable time frame for the results of a decision to yield a positive gain over the amount spent. Social media hasn’t really been around long enough to conclusively show that it has a positive ROI for many of not most companies who are making those investments. That doesn’t say you shouldn’t do it – but caveat emptor. And don’t believe anyone who can tell you they can measure your results – they might give you a # of hits or click-throughs but only YOU can measure the result in your bottom line.

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