FREEDOM.

I attended the special Course for Presidents, offered exclusively for alumni of this flagship Aileron course, on October 1-2 of 2013 and –as it always does – it sharpened my awareness and understanding of the importance of the Aileron concept of “Professional Management” in business.

The very interactive session with a wealth of entrepreneurship in the auditorium was both a tribute and a salute to Dave Sullivan who has almost singlehandedly shaped this Course for Presidents, but who is now stepping away to write a book and focus on his private consulting practice. He received a five minute standing ovation from the more than 50 alumni in his audience, all of whom have greatly benefited from his teachings. The session was ably and pleasantly co-facilitated by another Aileron star, Mary Connors.

The reason that I want to write about this is because it reminded me of the importance of “Freedom” in business. Although the business climate in America has become more and more regulated over time, there is still no country in the world that I know of where there is greater freedom to establish and run your own business than the United States of America. At least no other country where the business owner also enjoys the rule of law to protect his investment and achievements.

The freedom that Dave Sullivan harped on in his swan song was another, equally important, freedom. It is the freedom of the private business owner to shape and run his business in accordance with his personal vision of what the business should look like. It is also the freedom of the owner to decide what role he wants to play in the business and how much of his time he is willing to dedicate to the enterprise.

It struck me, as I was listening to the very interactive discourse that took place at this course for “retreads”, how many of the business owners in the room were passionately focused on exiting or distancing themselves from the business they own and –more often than not – have created. Not – to be sure – to rest on their laurels or play golf for the rest of their lives, but mostly for two reasons:

1.       To let the team they had built, and that- if they have done it right- has better and more complete skills and competencies than they have themselves, run the show and not stand in their way;

2.       To attend to other matters – and possibly other business – that need to be achieved in order to follow their personal vision.

A small business owner knows that he (I realize that in many instances it is “she”) has done right if he has achieved the freedom to be as active in or as distant from his business as he chooses to be. Dave Sullivan said it another way, more succinctly: “Wealth is not just a matter of money, but also of free time, freedom of choice and the opportunity to pursue your dreams.”

With freedom comes joy and joy is a key measurement of success in business. If it is not fun anymore, it is not worth it. It should be fun for the owner and it should be fun for the people working in the business. If any of them constantly think – and sometimes say – “I’d much rather be doing something else” they probably should.

A business owner who has not (yet) acquired the freedom to work on his business rather than in his business has not finished the job and is not ready to move on. The owner’s job is not done until he has built a business that can and will prosper in his absence. The owner’s job is to provide the capital required to operate the business, to establish the vision for the business, to create a business culture in which his enterprise can flourish and to put together a management team that can run the business. When all of that is done, there are almost certainly people who are better qualified than he is to make the day to day business decisions and it is time for him to cash in on his freedom to pursue other dreams that are part of his personal vision.

LIP SERVICE

Our economy has become a consumption economy and the conventional wisdom says that the consumer dollars go where they get best value, which is generally understood to be a combination of best quality and best service. But I find in my own personal finance that an awful lot of money goes to places where a good product and attentive service are hard to find. It goes there because there are no better alternatives.

In a consumption economy, marketing and - more specifically - advertising rules the roost and advertisers know only too well that it is their job to sell perception for reality. The whole purpose of advertising is to plant a perception in the consumer’s mind that the advertised product is something you cannot or should not do without.

The advertising world has also understood that it should hold out the promise and expectation of a great service experience to attract and retain the customer and so we get bombarded with commercials that are like the proverbial vacation destination brochure: the product and service you actually receive bear no appreciable relation to the impression created by the advertisement.

Banks, airlines and cable companies are probably the best examples of what I am talking about. Can you remember a truly pleasant experience in dealing with any of these unavoidable “service” providers? Mass merchandising stores are not far behind.

It is a troublesome thought that the financial health of our nation is so dependent on our preparedness to spend money on things we may or may not need, many of which have no lasting value and most of which offer only a mediocre value experience. The truth of the matter is that the only service provided in most of our c

consumptive lives is lip-service! Everyone in business is trained to liberally throw around slogans like “the customer comes first” and “great service is our promise to you” but very few actually provide the real thing. 

It shows, because we actually feel surprised when we encounter an example of really great customer service. It happened to me on our recent trip to Alaska when weather conditions delayed us for a day to get to our destination on the remote Aialik Bay of the Kenai Peninsula. The President of the company, Alaska Wildland Adventures, sent us a letter with his apologies for a situation that he had no control over but had us deprived of a day at our chosen destination (it was made up by an extra day at the Kenai River). The letter included a $300.00 credit and a certificate providing 25% discount for our next visit to that destination.

Turning a negative into a positive for a customer is one of the secrets to offering an exceptional customer service experience. It came on top of an otherwise flawless delivery of everything we were promised by this tour operator including the fact that we never had to worry about our luggage that somehow magically always managed to come back to us at the right time in the right place. It is positive incidents like this that remind us how we have become beaten down by indifferent and less than mediocre treatment we have to put up with most of the time we are buying.

I wish we could dial back advertising, but ironically it is our cherished First Amendment to the Constitution that stands in the way of doing so. How much better would our TV watching experience be if it were not constantly interrupted by seemingly interminable sequences of commercials? For one thing, it would be a great relief if we would no longer be pestered by the demeaning commercials for Cialis and Viagra. In fact, I think that all advertising for prescription pharmaceuticals should be banned because it interferes with the authority of the physician who should be in charge of selecting the proper treatment for our ailments.

The Romans, who - in so many ways - were the trailblazers for modern humanity, recognized the problem. They came up with the saying: “Mundus vult decipi; decipiator ergo”, which translates into: “People want to be deceived, so let them be.” This is language the advertising industry understands!

We all know that the Roman Empire ultimately fell because it exhausted itself in futility and, after its glory period around the start of the Christian calendar, could no longer revitalize itself and rally its people around a vision for a strong and sustainable nation. In the end it could not defend it vast borders and ward off the onslaught of hordes of enemies of much less sophistication and civilization and the world descended into the dark ages.

I see our preoccupation with consumption and our resignation in accepting shoddy service for purchases of vital needs like banking, transportation and communication as a writing on the wall that we may be heading the same way the Romans did. We are putting up with mediocrity and thus we are getting more of the same. We do not demand continuous improvement, much less excellence. We are allowing ourselves to be deceived time and again and yet we keep coming back for more. The advertising world wants to make us believe that “Perception is Reality” and we are paying lip-service.

It is time to push back against that self-serving fallacy. We are living in a make believe world and it is time to get back to valuing substance over image and investment over consumption.

INERTIA

How long do we take to respond to external impulses in our business, to warning signs, to the proverbial handwriting on the wall? There are many factors at work here. First, we are typically so busy doing what we are doing that it may take us awhile to figure out that the world is not standing still. Then, even if we pick up the warning signal that something fundamentally has changed, our tendency is to wait it out for a while and see if things don’t return to normal. At that time very likely wishful thinking kicks in and we convince ourselves that we can see it through without having to make painful adjustments that would take us out of our comfort zone. Let’s face it: we are creatures of habit as much as we don’t want to admit so, we do not normally change until the pain of staying with the status-quo exceeds the pain caused by change.

Sounds familiar? Small business is definitely more susceptible to the problem of inertia than big business because it generally lacks the benefit of a regular outside review of what’s happening inside the operation. Independent small business owners find out all the time that it is lonely at the top. Small business cannot tolerate layers of management and cannot afford expensive consultancy other than in rare cases. Therefore is has limited access to outside impulses, new approaches and critical review of existing practices and processes. Small business owners doggedly keep their heads down, doing what they do best and keep doing it. Over time they have blinders on whether they realize it or not.

Fundamentally, this is why the business landscape changes constantly and companies –even big names – come and go. Adjusting too slowly to new realities is a mortal sin in business.

Pat Jones, in his interview with Dean Graves, Superintendent at Chevy Chase Club, for the October 2009 Issue of Golf Course Industry magazine draws out that complacency is the enemy: “in short, don’t take what you’ve done today for granted and try to do better tomorrow.”

This is not unlike Bill Gates admonishing us that success is a lousy teacher, because it fools you into thinking that you can’t fail. Or Mike Krzyzewski admonishing his players: “If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.” 

     

So, how to overcome the gravitational pull of inertia? There are many good answers to this question. In the first place, a small business owner is well advised to hook up with Aileron. If he does, he will likely be told to get himself an outside board of directors. These two steps alone will take him out of his isolation –and probably out of his comfort zone too – and expose him to the impulses from the outside that he so much needs.   

          

Another way for a small business owner to pull himself out of inertia is to force himself for a good part of his working hours to act like an owner/entrepreneur rather than the chief crisis handler. Aileron has a “Dream Room” a place where you are encouraged to come to dream big dreams about what you are going to do with your life, your business and your future. The dream room is equipped with a white board enabling you to write down the fabulous dreams you conjure up. You don’t have to come to Aileron to do that. Taking time out to contemplate what you can and want to do different in order to produce different and better results is a good way to overcome inertia. It forces you to see that there is a different world out there than the world you have come to accept as your own. If you are not happy with the results of your efforts then it is ludicrous to expect a better outcome from doing more of the same! 

 

Dreaming is one way to shape your future. Another way is learning from other entrepreneurs, applying their ideas and concepts – particularly the proven ones – to your business. You can do that again by engaging with Aileron by registering for some of their courses. Or by joining a local or regional business round table. At the same time you should read at least two business books a year and apply the learnings in your business.    

     

One key to breaking through the inertia curse is found in opening yourself and your business up to external influences. Another one is in cultivating and increasing your awareness of how and how fast the world and the economy in which you operate is changing and then forcing yourself to adjust. The third key is to never be satisfied with the status-quo and always be working on a plan that brings you closer to realizing your dream.

Inertia is an ugly thing. It keeps you in a place you no longer should be.

DETRITUS

Detritus is an accumulation of disintegrated material. That’s what comes to mind when I’m thinking of Detroit and what its demise portends for the future of our public finances at large. It is irony that the city that is synonymous with the mismanaged private sector auto industry (no offense to Ford) and had to endure the managed bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler is now itself at the top of the iceberg of a growing mismatch between publicly made commitments and the capacity to deliver against these commitments now and in the future.

Detroit has the dubious honor of being the test case for how a public entity can finally face the fact that it has promised more than it can deliver, renege on its obligations and try to start anew.

I see it as a flaw of our democratic system that we can let it come this far, with open eyes, and then have no more choice other than seek refuge in bankruptcy.

It is only the scale of the Detroit default that sets it apart from what is happening all over America. Municipal bankruptcies are popping up all over the place, Stockton and San Bernardino, CA, Harrisburg, PA, Detroit, MI and the cause is just about the same everywhere: incompetent, dishonest and self-absorbed elected officials willing to give away the store to their constituents to be popular and get re-elected. It was no different with General Motors and Chrysler. It was much easier for top executives to give in to UAW demands that would not affect the P&L until after they would have retired than to manage productivity, payroll and retirement expenses in a responsible way and get the UAW to see it the same way.

Unfortunately, we are still only seeing the top of the iceberg.

Just looking at unfunded pension liabilities carried by the States, gives us a glimpse of the magnitude of the problem. The State of Illinois, by itself, has a pension fund shortfall in excess of $100 billion, growing by $17 million every day. The Economist, in its July 27, 2013 edition, points to calculations by the Centre for Retirement Research at Boston College that reckon that the combined pension fund shortfall of all States may be as high as $2.7 trillion. It also reports that Moody’s reckons that schemes are 52% underfunded.

Of course, at the Federal level, it is little different. There too, our public officials have promised much more than they can deliver with existing tax revenues and funding authorizations. The scary part there is that the unfunded obligations under our entitlement programs are not even included in the $17 trillion National Debt. No wonder that my children and their peers have no confidence and, therefore, little expectation that Social Security will be there for them. They are right, unless Congress gets its act together and deals with the important issues of deficit elimination, debt reduction, tax- and entitlement-reform.

State and Federal Governments have no access to Chapter 9 Bankruptcy that municipalities and counties have. They have no other option than to restructure their finances in such a way that they can move forward. In almost all instances that means that they will have to renege on earlier made promises.

There are no good solutions when governments of any kind have allowed to let things get out of hand. The bill becomes due someday and the only question is: who is going to pay it. In the case of counties and municipalities, if the public authorities don’t answer that question, it will ultimately be answered by the bankruptcy court.

In the case of Detroit, which reportedly has a deficit of $18 billion, this means that the bankruptcy court will have to decide how to split the burden between creditors and city employees and retirees who will have to learn to live on significantly less that they were promised by a succession of city officials who have failed them. The outcome will send ripples far and wide in that it will most certainly be precedent setting and affect the municipal bond business and the rights of public-sector workers in every municipality, county or State that has failed to tailor the entitlements of its employees to its revenue producing capacity.

The only good thing in this is that it will almost certainly hasten the process of converting public pensions from defined income programs to defined contribution programs. This process, which is nearly completed in the private sector, is well under way, at least for new employees, in States like Alaska, Michigan (!), Nebraska and Utah.

Detritus is the right word for the mess we are in, because our system of entitlements has been disintegrating even though our public officials prefer to live in denial of this reality until they no longer can, like in the case of Detroit. The real question is: “What needs to change in our democratic process to keep politicians from over promising and under delivering and how can such change be brought about.” That is a question for which there is no bankruptcy judge – or any other arbiter – to answer. The answer can only come from the public that has to hold its politicians accountable for the decisions they make.

A good place to start would be to severely cut or eliminate the retirement benefits and other perks of the very same public officials who signed off on the entitlements that now turn out to be unaffordable. If ordinary public servants have to suffer then the officials who brought this misery about should be the first to see their privileges slashed.

Fire Your Customer?

That is not such a dumb question as it might look at first glance.

Who does not have some customers who want it all on their terms; who nickel and dime you to death; who burden you with unsubstantiated claims and unwarranted returns? Who make you jump through hoops and never pay you on time and only as much as they think they owe you? Do you recognize that customer inside your business?

There is a disproportionate resource (time and management) commitment associated with managing this type of customer. Fire him! Since you don’t get all of the business from your market place anyway, leave this customer to your competition. It will absorb their scarce resources and take their eyes off the ball.

Just like there are undesirable customers, there are also undesirable suppliers, sales representatives and SKU’s.

As a rule, every distributor owes it to him/herself to set up financial tracking systems that allow for the systematic calculation of margin contribution (per month, fiscal quarter and year as desired) per:

·         Customer

·         Supplier

·         Sales Representative

·         SKU

Once these data are available on a routine basis, the magic of the spreadsheet will then easily allow you to rank your customers, suppliers, sales reps and SKU’s in descending order of margin contribution. Voila. You have all you need to dramatically improve your business. All you have to do is draw a line at the bottom 5-10-25% percent of the customers, suppliers, sales representatives and/or SKU’s and resolve to cut out unproductive elements in your operations. You draw the line where the numbers indicate you don’t get an acceptable return for your resource commitment. Let the numbers do the (hard) work for you and cut out the dead wood, religiously and periodically.

Keep in mind that poorly performing customers, suppliers, sales reps and SKU’s are a drag on your financial performance, your operating efficiency and your working capital. Since Cash is King, put it to work where it is appreciated and provides a handsome return.

Not doing anything about below par performance on the part of customers, suppliers, sales reps or SKU’s will quickly become demotivating to those who do perform and will not go unnoticed by the marketplace and employees. It will create a culture of the wrong kind in and around your business.

Growth is a vital part of business, but it also can be a cancer if it becomes growth for growth’ sake. If growth is top-line oriented without regard to the contribution it delivers to the bottom-line it serves no good long term purpose. Sometimes it is better to pull back from top-line growth by taking out the undesirables. It may turn out that firing your bottom 25 customers, terminating your under performing suppliers, killing your under performing SKU’s and dismissing your under performing sales representative(s), is the best thing you could do for your business! 

Just make sure that your information systems let you know with precision which ones to cut.

THE REST OF THE TEAM

“The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.” John Wooden.

As you climb the ladder in the business world, you get to see a lot of resumes. I have written them, read more than I care to remember and edited many for friends who had good reasons to update their resume.

The one thing about resumes that strikes me now that I have left the field of active career makers is that, without exception, they always include statements like: 

“While at company blank (you fill in the name), I grew sales by 50% and increased margins by 1.2%.” or,

“I turned around a business that was moribund into a top three contender in its field.”

I know, because I have written similar representations in the many resumes that I have maintained over time.

But when, the other day, I hit upon John Wooden’s quote that I repeat in the heading hereof, it dawned on me how misleading and preposterous such representations are. Business is a team sport rather than an individual sport. Business is much more like football or basketball than it is like golf or weightlifting.

Our first resume writer may very well have been in charge of a sales team that achieved the 50% increase in sales and the 1.2% increase in margins, but it would not have happened without the team delivering the results. That does not denigrate or take away from his accomplishment as a team leader, but his resume should not state what it does but rather something like “While at company blank, the sales team under my leadership grew sales by 50% and increased margins by 1.2%.”

Our second resume writer may, as business lead, very well have been in charge of a turn-around of the business segment he was responsible for, but would the turn-around have been successful without the front office directing, supporting and financing the plan and without the staff- fed up with operating in a moribund environment – accepting accountability for the results of the work they were performing? In this instance the intellectual honesty of the resume would be significantly enhanced if it stated: “I was given every opportunity, including a motivated and competent team, to turn around a business that was moribund into a top three contender in its field and I made it happen.”

In either case, the real accomplishment of the resume writer was the fact that he was able to create and manage a team of people that collectively knew what they were doing, wanted to make their hard work matter and were willing to hold themselves accountable for the team achieving its objectives. That is no small feat and worth of a prominent display in the resume.

If you want to be a star, in sports or in business, you’d better first build a team that is competent and motivated to help you achieve your goals. The next challenge will be to keep your team focused and on track and to make sure that you give credit where credit is due: with the rest of the team.

The Blinding Light of the Obvious

At one point in my career, I had a boss who knew that he had to invite discussion among his key staff members of how the company we worked for was doing and where it was heading. But he was doing little more than paying lip-service to business-school conventional wisdom. His favorite response to anyone coming up with an idea for the improvement of the business was: “you strike me with the blinding light of the obvious”, suggesting that he had long considered the idea being brought forward and already incorporated it in his plans for the future. If the idea had any merit it had to have come from him.

It will not surprise anybody that this way of denigration of participative management eventually took the wind out of the sails of all the key employees and the outcome is predictable: the company, which once was an industry innovator and leader, was absorbed by a corporate giant and no longer exists.

In American politics, the blinding light of the obvious plays a very different role. Even the most common sense steps toward improvement of the system are being ignored or tabled. It is as if the blinding light of the obvious never penetrates Capitol Hill or the White House.

How else can we explain that:

1.       At a time of burdensome federal deficits and debt, we continue to subsidize farmers while commodity prices for the main crops they produce are and have been at above average levels;

2.       We artificially pump up the price of corn by continuing to subsidize the use of corn for ethanol production (which, without government support could not compete with oil) for automobile fuel use;

3.       As the only nation in the developed world, we allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise their scary wares directly to the public (with cautionary warnings and all) rather than leave it up to our doctors to decide what’s good for us;

4.       Congress votes to spend money on military hardware (tanks and aircraft) that the military does not even want, at least not in the numbers provided by Congress;

5.       Faced with threatened insolvency of our big entitlement programs Social Security and Medicare, we fail to take the simple steps, outlined by a variety of think tanks, public interest groups, columnists and engaged citizens that can put these programs back on the path of long term sustainability;

6.       Faced with structural budget deficit and a messy, ineffective and metastasized tax code, we can’t have a serious debate about simplification let alone the merits of a consumption tax versus income tax and the use of sin taxes to discourage dangerous behaviors;

7.       We know that our world dominance depends on how well we educate our children and yet we let the cost of higher education, particularly at the top schools, move out of reach for just about all other than the very rich;

8.       We know that our health care system is the most expensive in the world without offering, across the board, best in class results, but we utterly fail to bring cost under control even with the largest legislative effort in decades: we specifically prohibit Medicare to negotiate the cost of pharmaceuticals like the health insurance companies do and we prohibit the free flow of medicine from across the Canadian border.

There is so much the Federal Government, legislative and executive branch, could do to keep America competitive, but the system is paralyzed. Washington is immobilized by interest groups and petty jealousy between Republicans and Democrats.

It is as if the army of politicians inside the Beltway is under control of the mob and scared to death to do anything that the boss will not condone. The boss, of course, in this case is the lobbyist for whatever special interest group rules the roost. It is demoralizing to see how much our legislators are beholden to institutions like the NRA, AARP, NEA, UAW, ACLU, not to speak of the lobbies for major industries like defense, banking, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, financial services and communications. The voting public should be the boss, but its influence has been hijacked by institutions with pockets deep enough to buy the subservience and vote of our representatives.

The net result is that the Nation’s business no longer gets done. The Federal Government can no longer proclaim that it sets the rules of the game by which all constituents have to play and it is incapable of creating optimum conditions for free enterprise and citizens to shape conditions for a brilliant, sustainably competitive future.

One has to be blind, blinded by the lightning strike of the obvious, not to see how even the most common sense solutions to our challenges get stopped in their tracks because of the sway special interest groups hold over our legislators on both sides of the aisle. So, the question becomes: how much longer are we going to tolerate this perverted façade of representative democracy?