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012 Working with an Advisory Board

011 Working with an Advisory Board

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

This week on the podcast, we talk about how advisory boards can help get you further in business and in life, as well as what being a member of an advisory board is like. We also give some tips on how to choose the right people for your advisory board and how to get the most out of your time with your advisory board.

Make sure to check it out!

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Choosing People for Your Advisory Board

As a business owner, I may look at a potential member of my advisory board and ask myself why that person would want to join my advisory board when he or she is already very busy. But I challenge myself and anyone who is listening to this podcast to ask the person anyway.

Many successful business people are looking for opportunities to help others who are perhaps a few years behind them in terms of the growth of their businesses. They’re looking for ways to share their experiences and help others in their journeys.

Benefits of Being a Member of an Advisory Board

Being a member of an advisory board is a learning experience for that person as well.

When I’m on advisory boards, I always try to add value—to give back—but I also learn what those organizations are doing and then share what I take from that experience with other business owners who I mentor.

In this way, being part of an advisory board works both ways. I don’t think there’s a downside in having an advisory board or being part of an advisory board.

Operations of an Advisory Board

At the outset, the advisory board and the person who convenes it should discuss the range of issues that are on the table for discussion, the typical meeting agenda, how often the meetings will take place, and who will be the chairperson. Each advisory board needs a chairperson—somebody who leads it and keeps the ball rolling by creating meeting agendas, staying in touch with the person who convened the advisory board, and ensuring that progress is made and follow-up occurs.

An advisory board that isn’t set up with some structure and then proactively managed won’t be effective.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

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011 Dynamics of a Family Business

011 Dynamics of a Family Business

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In this week’s episode, we talk about the dynamics of a family business and how you can ensure that your family business moves forward without compromising the relationships among family members involved in the business. We also talk about whether you should encourage your children to join the family business or allow them pursue their own passions.

This episode is full of insights about parenting, family life, and business, so make sure to check it out!

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Structured Communication in Family Businesses

Family members who are in business together are often good at making assumptions—having a sixth sense—about actions that should be taken, because they’re familiar with another. But the ease of making such assumptions can have negative consequences. Structured communication processes can help.

Family businesses must have clear rules about which decisions can be made by whom, which decisions must be discussed and with whom, how those decisions should be communicated, and the process for implementing them.

Although some lines may always be blurry, structured communication can minimize the challenges.

Involving Children in the Family Business

I’m in favor of involving children in the family business early. But I’m also in favor of encouraging children to find their own ways and their own paths rather than pressuring them to go into the family business.

I recommend that you encourage your children to get involved in the business to learn the business model, how the business operates, and how to make wise business decisions.

Standards for Family Members in the Business

You should have clear standards, or expectations, for family members in the business. For example, if the expectation for employees is that the workday starts at 8:00 a.m., maybe all family members should start work at 7:55 a.m. If the usual lunch break starts at noon, maybe family members should take lunch at 12:05 p.m. Standards usually should be higher for family members to ensure that they earn the respect of their non-family coworkers.

How Being a Parent and Running a Business are Similar

I’m not a parent. But I think that in parenting, as in business, we do the best we can and sometimes we’re harder on ourselves than we should be. Becoming a parent doesn’t come with a guidebook, and businesses are the same way, so let’s be a little bit easier on ourselves.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

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010 Winners and Losers in Tough Times

010 Winners and Losers in Tough Times

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

Today on the podcast, we explore some of the strategies that businesses employ during highs and lows. When things are tough, how do successful businesses adapt? When things are going well, what strategies do they implement to help them sustain their success?

Check out the full episode!

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

How to Get Through the Hard Times

I’ve been through both the oil and gas industry downturn and the boom time when the province of Newfoundland and Labrador was doing amazingly well but the rest of Canada wasn’t. Then Canada’s economy started to grow again, but the oil and gas industry tanked and the province’s economy followed soon after.

To make it through an economic downturn, focus on what really can get you to the end rather than worrying about things on the fringe.

Instead of chasing everything, trim back and focus on your primary goals—your primary service area and your primary client—and scrutinize your expenses and your organization’s structure.

Raising Prices During Tough Times

Raising prices in tough times is difficult, so seeing qualified individuals deciding to do just that should give you pause.

In tough times, customers are more concerned than usual about risk and so they’re ready to pay more to mitigate it. I can’t tell you whether raising prices in a particular situation is right or wrong; however, your team should stop and think about any potential tactic or strategy before pursuing it—especially when you all may be feeling under stress and depleted.

Lower Prices in Exchange for a Long-Term Contract

If you can convince your suppliers to commit to a lower price for a longer term, you’ll be better off because you will have reduced your costs.

And in such a situation the suppliers may think, “We’ll give a lower price on a long-term contract, because we want to reduce our risk and lock in the business.” In addition to reducing your cost, you will have built a long-term relationship.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

Winners and Losers in Tough Times

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009 The Ladder: How to Grow a Business Through Relationships

009 The Ladder: How to Grow a Business Through Relationships

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

We have a wonderful treat for you this week on the podcast, listeners!

Chris, Jol, and Carol talk about the ladder principles and how you can send the right message to your referral sources and to your clients. They talk about using the right words in conversations, how the language you use can change a person’s mind-set and your business, giving quality client service, asking for referrals, building referral resources, creating win-win relationships, and so much more.

Don’t miss out on this episode!

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Changing Language to Change Mind-Set

Changing mind-set starts with changing language.

If you’re in a terrible situation and that is all you think about, you won’t get out of that situation. Your ability to get yourself out of a bad situation is dictated by how you approach language and use it to formulate your thoughts.

The Importance of Using the Right Words

Through my research about how people make purchase decisions, I’ve learned that the decision is based on feelings at a subconscious level.

If you the salesperson leave the impression that you’re busy, your potential clients internalize that. When they go home and think about the problems that they need help solving, they feel that you’re too busy to provide that help. They hesitate to call you. You miss out on the opportunity to get their business.

Referral Sources

From my experience, relationships must be win-win. The terminology I use is you have clients, you have alliances, and you have partnerships.

You’re familiar with what a client is. Partnerships are formal arrangements between two people or two businesses. But alliances are win-win relationships in which each person or business looks for market opportunities for the other and keeps the other updated on a regular basis. Alliances are active, win-win relationships that generate business opportunities.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Ladder

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008 Customer Intimacy

008 Customer Intimacy

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

This week on the podcast, we take a deep dive into one of the three competitive strategies for market leadership, as mentioned in the book The Discipline of Market Leaders: customer intimacy.


Chris, Jol, and Carol talk about the types of conversations you can have with your customers to enable you to learn their pain points, the opportunities that come from having an intimate relationship with your customers, and the importance of having an attitude of service.


We hope you enjoy this episode!

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Getting into the Lives of Your Customers

Working at a Fortune 500 company, I learned how they get into the lives of their customers. For the business to be successful, we had to do that.

Scale is important. How much do you know about your customer? How many touch points do you have? How well do you know the customer’s business? What are its pain points? Businesses thrive on knowing as much as possible about their customers.

Customer Intimacy for Small Organizations

The organizations that I’ve worked with have many, many customers. In retail, you can’t contact all of your customers.

But you should have touch points for the customers who buy your products on a regular basis. You can automate some of that contact. Regardless, touch points can give you an understanding of where your sales are coming from and how you can increase them. Where is your market share coming from? What industry is giving you most of your customers? Do you know that industry extremely well, or do you need to learn more about its pain points?

A Structure for Diagnostic Conversations with Your Customers

As the relationship between you and your customer develops, a broader range of issues are introduced into the conversation. In this way, your opportunities to serve that customer grow. And so do your sales opportunities.

But how can you cultivate such a relationship? Talk about the aspirations of the person and the aspirations of the person’s business so that you can gather information and better understand the situation. Help him or her to articulate goals and then think through strategies and tactics for reaching those goals. Clearly articulate what is going well and what is not going so well. Out of a conversation like that, issues pop. The issues may be strictly business ones or may be related to personal matters. When the issues have been identified, the opportunities will flow.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Discipline of Market Leaders (book) by Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema

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007 The Effect of Personal Health on Business Performance

007 The Effect of Personal Health on Business Performance

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In this week’s podcast, we look at the effect of personal health on business performance and get some tips from Jol, Chris, and Carol on how they maintain healthy, balanced lives.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Finding Happiness and Decreasing Stress

A lot of people feel the need to spend a lot of money on things that don’t really create happiness. But if we can increase revenue and spend less, we’ll have less stress in our lives and so will live longer.

Spending More to Make More

There’s no real difference between business and personal life in terms of justifying expenditures.

In business, sometimes you need to spend to generate profit, but doing that requires the discipline to consider whether each expense is necessary. In personal life, you may want to buy more because you think that it will bring happiness, but you should think just as critically about those expenditures.

The Importance of Human Connection

Connecting with other people and having that feeling of connection is happiness.

I sometimes do a network audit, which involves looking at your operational network, personal network, and strategic network. Most people fall short in the strategic network, but the fullness of your personal network is often an indicator of how happy you are. So building your personal network is a great way of bringing happiness to your life.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Profit Formula

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006 The Profit Formula

006 The Profit Formula

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

This week on the podcast, Chris, Jol and Carol talk about the profit formula, what it means to the client, and the effects of cost-cutting on the business.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

A Mathematical Perspective on Business

One way of looking at your business is as the mathematical formula for creating profit. If you think about the profit formula from a mathematical point of view and then think about the elements of the formula, you can figure out what you can do to make the result what you want.

Purpose of Increasing the Profit Margins

Every strategy in every business, if you peel it all the way back, is designed to do one of two things: increase payments to the company or decrease payments out of the company.

 One way or another—and it may be a long route— that’s what businesses are designed to do.

Low-Margin Businesses vs. High-Margin Businesses

In low-margin businesses, processes are usually very well developed and look at the cents and the seconds. These businesses set their units of measurement so that everybody in the company is very aware that it takes a lot of volume to make any amount of profit.

The oil & gas industry usually is a very high-margin business. But during the economic downturn we had to look at every single expense line item. The problem is that we had to define the cause of each expense, so it was no longer good enough to look at, for example, the office supplies category. Instead, we had to look at the detail of pens, paper, etc. and figure out what we could eliminate. In other words, looking at the expense category was no longer sufficient. We had to break it down further than that. And that required discipline.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Profit Formula

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005 The Importance of Business Processes

The Importance of Business Processes
005 The Importance of Business Processes

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of processes and how to identify and implement them in your business.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Business Processes in a Fortune 500 Company

When you grow up in a Fortune 500 company,everything is driven by process and discipline. It’s recorded, and there are metrics,and you live and die by the quarter.

The oil & gas industry does this superbly. But process is one of the things that every organization looks at and struggles with. Even Fortune 500 companies struggle to make themselves more efficient or more profitable. But when you translate that and step out—as Carol did—from a publicly traded company to a private company, it changes a little.

I think private companies have the most opportunity to grow in this area. Putting into place strong processes and getting people to buy into those process is, ultimately, where we’re going to see profits grow.

Carol’s Definition of a Process

Process, to me, is where you say whatyou’re going to do and then you do that.

If you can record that and do it systematically, it becomes a really good communication tool. But process isn’t so much about being able to respond on the fly or be responsive to the industry’s needs. It’s more a communication tool that enables everyone to know what one another is doing and makes task progress measurable. And things that are measured get done.

Identifying Your Processes

You already have processes. You may not have thought of the things you do in terms of a process, but you are doing things. You’re doing things this week that are similar to the things you’ll do next week. The question is: Are you doing things in the most organized, efficient way? Can you streamline and focus what you’re doing, eliminating tasks that aren’t adding value or helping your business to perform and adding or expanding tasks that are more important to your business?

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

Grit by Angela Duckworth (book)

High Performance Through Process Excellence by Mathias Kirchmer (book)

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004 Building a Strong Leadership Team in Your Organization

004 Building a Strong Leadership Team in Your Organization

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In the first five episodes of this show, we take a deep dive into a manifesto that Jol Hunter wrote a number of years ago about his 500 or so visits with leaders of organizations throughout Atlantic Canada, the rest of Canada, and parts of the United States.

In that manifesto, Jol Hunter describes the four factors that cause that gap between businesses’ current performance and potential performance: CEO time, process discipline, relationships as the source of all revenue, and members of the senior leadership team being on the same page.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

In this episode, Chris, Carol, and Jol discuss diagnosing problems within teams, having a third party do the diagnosis, and what makes a well-functioning team.

If you have feedback on the show, by all means reach out to any of us. Enjoy!

The Four Factors That Cause the Gap Between Actual Performance and Potential Performance

I’ve come to the conclusion that, generally speaking, there’s a gap between our actual performance and our potential performance as businesspeople and that this gap is caused by four factors. When we work on these four factors, we close the gap. That’s what we’ve been working through in this podcast.

The first factor is how the CEO of the organization invests his or her time. This is the most significant determinant of the business’s success.

The second factor is the discipline and organization that the CEO brings to the business. A lot of business is far from glamorous. It’s just doing the little things right, again and again. When I asked business owners to rate the discipline and organization in their businesses, on a scale of one to ten, the most common answer was three, so obviously there’s room for improvement.

The third factor is the lack of deliberateprocesses in building and nurturing relationships. I’ve come to the conclusionthat all revenue in business comes from and grows due to relationships;therefore, we need to put constant effort into relationships even when wedescribe ourselves as busy.

The fourth factor is the degree to which leadership teams are on the same page and working together rather than putting their energy into different efforts or, worse, into counterproductive efforts.

Ingredients of a Well-Functioning Team

Be upfront about your integrity, that you’d never say anything that would jeopardize them or their businesses. And, if you can establish that very early on, every time you have a conversation it will be open and honest.

Getting Everyone on the Same Page

Leadership is critical. This leads us back to the most significant determinant of the business’s success: how the CEO invests his or her time. That’s the first point.

The second point, which comes out of that, is the diagnosis process for determining how we can best operate together. There are various methods that you can use for doing that and for having honest conversations about it.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Courage to be Disliked (book) by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

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003 Building Revenue Through Relationships

003 Building Revenue Through Relationships

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In the first five episodes of this show, we take a deep dive into a manifesto that Jol Hunter wrote a number of years ago about his 500 or so visits with leaders of organizations throughout Atlantic Canada, the rest of Canada, and parts of the United States.

In that manifesto, Jol Hunter describes the four factors that cause that gap between businesses’ current performance and potential performance: CEO time, process discipline, relationships as the source of all revenue, and members of the senior leadership team being on the same page.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

In the previous episodes of this podcast, we discussed the four underlying reasons that we don’t fulfill our potential and our businesses’ potential. So far, we’ve focused on being on the same page with our teams.

This week, we take a deep dive into building relationships with clientele as a way of growing revenue. We talk about having diagnostic conversations that build strong relationships, and we explore the six types of questions you should ask during these conversations.

You’ll gain a lot of value from listening closely to the episode while following along with these notes.

If you have feedback on the show, by all means reach out to any of us. Enjoy!

What Makes a Successful CEO

A diagnostic conversation is built on the premise that, if you go to a doctor’s office, the doctor doesn’t open his or her big book of pills and ask, “Which one would you like?”

Instead, the doctor asks a series of questions in order to better understand the circumstances—what is going well and what isn’t—so that together you can decide how to deal with the situation. That’s a diagnostic conversation.

Trust

Trust is critical. All three of us (Carol, Jol, and Chris) are in businesses in which people open up to us in very personal ways. And it’s not a matter of us meeting a potential client and learning that everything is roses. It’s not usually like that.

But if we ask the six types of questions, people open up. They say, “Hey, this is what I’m doing wrong” or “This is what’s not going right.” They open up about their sales processes or their competition or whatever else. Confidentiality is vital to these diagnostic conversations and to the relationships that you’re building with these people, because they’re relaying things that are deeply personal to their organizations. It’s vital for us to maintain confidentiality and never ever mention anything out of context. That’s how we earn respect.

Be upfront about your integrity, that you’d never say anything that would jeopardize them or their businesses. And, if you can establish that very early on, every time you have a conversation it will be open and honest.

Best Practices for Tracking and Maintaining Relationships

There are oodles of CRM products that can help you track and maintain your relationships.

The key is to be deliberate and forward-thinking and set aside time to work at whatever system you choose. That way you’ll know when you’ve lost touch and can more easily decide on your next move.

To learn more about these topics, listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.