Stop Networking and Start Connecting

When mentoring young professionals and students on planning their careers, I tell them what I wish someone would have told me early in my career. That is that two of the most important things you can learn that will enable your success in any field is communicating (especially public speaking) and developing strong business relationships. We’ll save communicating for another post but the topic of this post will be how to develop strong business relationships.

Most people take the standard “networking” approach to developing business relationships. They go to conferences, seminars, local chapter meetings, and networking functions regularly and hand out as many business cards as they can. The focus is solely on contact acquisition. If you’re primary activity in networking is handing your business card to every person you meet, you’re a networking jerk. Stop doing that!

Instead, you should focus on developing the relationships you already have. ... Read More

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Consulting as a Digital Nomad

There have always been nomadic workers who work on the road. In the past decade, a new type of nomad has emerged, the Digital Nomad. As technology has enabled affordable, continuous connectivity anywhere, more and more information workers have moved toward a mobile lifestyle. Dell provides technology to these workers and has created an online community for these Digital Nomads. Here is their definition of a Digital Nomad:

“In the Connected Era, Digital Nomads will Rule – Redefining productivity, placeshifting and timeshifting. Their devices won’t wait to connect – they will simply be connected. Always. Everywhere. Business as usual will become business unusual.”

Source: digitalnomads.com

How does the concept of a Digital Nomad apply to consulting?

Consulting as a Digital Nomad

Most consultants are also Digital Nomads. By nature a consultant is mobile, visiting client locations regularly. Since their clients have no reason to visit a consultant’s office, there is no need to have an office. A consultant’s office is wherever they are when they perform their craft. This is even more the case with solo consultants as they work alone and have no need for an office. Here are some considerations when preparing to apply the Digital Nomad approach to consulting: ... Read More

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CEOs Define the Framework for Decision-Making

Decisions are made at all levels of an organization, spanning short-term tactical to long-term strategic, unimportant to critical, low-risk to high-risk, simple to complex, and common to unusual.

How does a CEO improve and influence the full range of decision-making at all levels of their organization? The wrong answer is for the executive to insert themselves in more levels of decision-making. Instead, CEOs should focus on defining the framework for decision-making. The framework should clearly define the criteria (objective and/or subjective) that will be used as the basis of a specific type of decision. ... Read More

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The Case for Solo Consulting

If you are a cubicle dweller, I feel your pain. I’ve been there. I’ve got the t-shirt. After 6 years with one Fortune 500 company and 7 years with another, I made the jump to solo consulting. There’s a whole story there but we’ll save that for another time. Let’s just say that going solo was the best move I’ve made in my career. The goal of this post is to lay out the case for you to go solo.

If you are one of the people described in the next section, I highly recommend that you consider this profession.

Who Should Be A Solo Consultant?

While you can go solo anytime in your career, this profession is ideal for someone who is already established in their career and already has a financial cushion and network of contacts. Once you have built up a resume and punched your ticket, going solo is the ticket to leading a better lifestyle while reaping the benefits of your years of hard work.

Benefits of Solo Consulting

  • Money: It’s common knowledge that you have more control over the amount of money you make as a business owner than you do as an employee. As a solo professional, your overhead is minimal and most of the money you make goes straight to you. I personally take out approximately 95% of revenues out of my business every year. There’s no reason to keep the capital in the company because, as a solo, I don’t need capital to fund expansion. While money isn’t the only reason to pursue solo consulting, it’s a very big reason to consider it as a profession. ... Read More
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Hockey: Sioux City Musketeers 89-90 – Hit Results in Fights

This is one of my favorite hits from when I played hockey for the Sioux City Musketeers in ’89-90. I’m #25 in white delivering the hit. The next play is the other team’s response to the hit.

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Hockey: Sioux City Musketeers 90-91 Overtime Goal

This is a highlight from the Sioux City Musketeers hockey team – 90-91 season. We were one of the worst teams in the league and were playing one of the top teams. The game was tied 6-6 in overtime. Our coach had come up with this crazy play where we would shoot the puck the length of the ice and if it had enough speed at the far corner it would bounce off an edge that stuck out on the Zamboni door and right in front of the net. Meanwhile, our forward would sprint down the ice and beat the defenseman to the puck. We all laughed at the coach but he made us practice it a bunch of times. Wouldn’t you know it, it worked. I was the guy who shot the puck down the ice and Jim Fish was the one who scored the goal.

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Enabling Opportunistic Tactical Decision-Making

Does your company capitalize when a market condition creates a significant short-term opportunity? Recently, big box retailers missed 2 opportunities in the NW:

  • Power Outage: Two winters ago, the Seattle area was hit with a storm that took out power in the whole region for 1-2 weeks. Generators were sold out immediately and nowhere to be found until power was restored 1-2 weeks later.
  • Heat Wave: Last week, the Seattle area had record heat. Every big box retailer in the area had sold out of portable ACs on the first day of the heat wave. The guy at Lowes said they had 60 people lined up at their door at 6am for a shipment they received of 35 generators.

In both cases, by the time the catalyst occurred, it was too late to capitalize on the opportunity. Only 13% of homes in the NW have AC. My guess is they could have sold a several thousand portable ACs if they had them in stock. Not bad in these tough economic times.

First, what triggers can you proactively put in place in your company to capitalize on short-term opportunities like these? Second, what policies do you have in place that would allow regional management to make decisions quickly to act on these opportunities?

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Fire the Lawyers

A lawyer’s job in a negotiation is to advise on risk and the law. Lawyers are not typically the decision-makers in a negotiation. The worst-case scenario for a lawyer is that they fail to uncover every possible risk that may become an issue in the future. For this reason, lawyers will often fight to the end to create the perfect contract with zero risk for their client/employer. This is where I use the phrase “Fire the Lawyers”. I don’t mean this literally but there comes a time in every negotiation when you cross the threshold and have only small, inconsequential terms left to resolve. This is the time to take the negotiations out of the lawyer’s hands (“Fire the Lawyers”) and escalate the remaining terms to the decision-makers. It’s an art to determine when you have reached this point in a negotiation. One sign is when the lawyers begin arguing over a single word. While a single word can change the term significantly, it is also an indicator that 95% of the contract is completed and you are now down to the small stuff. The decision-makers can often resolve these small issues quickly when it means completing the deal. Next time you see your negotiation starting to drag on endlessly and shift to fighting over the small stuff, “Fire the Lawyers” and drive the contract to completion.

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12 Methods for Researching Vendors

Researching vendors can be extremely beneficial or a big waste of time and money. A key to success in selecting the right vendor for your business is determining which research methods to use and to what extent. The diagram included in this post lists common research methods that can help you differentiate your list of prospective vendors.

Research Methods

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Reduce Input to Increase Decision-making Output

I was listening to Leo Babauta’s interview of lifestyle design expert Tim Ferriss and something Tim said caught my attention. He was talking about all the different sources of distraction competing for our attention and that he found he could write more productively if he eliminated the possibility of distraction. In other words, he reduced the input so he could produce more output.

This can be applied to decision-making as well. Instead of getting caught in a reactive decision-making mode, executives should delegate all the small and medium impact decisions to their middle managers. By reducing or eliminating the continuous incoming flow of small and medium impact decisions, an executive frees up the time and mental bandwidth to focus on the high impact decisions. This increase in focus on high impact decisions should produce a greater output for the organization, assuming the right decisions are made (but that’s another post).

Take an inventory of the decisions you make over a period of time to see if you are spending too much of your time on small and medium impact decisions. Then ask yourself which of those decisions you will delegate to your middle managers? By delegating these small and medium impact decisions, you will free up your time to focus on the high impact decisions and at the same time give your managers a chance to hone their decision-making ability.

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