Shutterstock

Most of my days are spent with clients who have been doing what they do in business for a while now. Clients with “newer” businesses have met their 5-year anniversaries, and my most experienced clients have 40-plus years running their business. As my team pilots a new program we are launching, we have accepted a number of new entrepreneurs into the beta. They are at an exciting point in their business evolution. Some have a year or two under their belts and are looking to grow, while a few are looking over the edge of the proverbial mountain that is launching a new business for the first time and asking, “Can I do this? Will I do this? Is it worth it?”

Asking questions is a great skill, and it’s necessary when undertaking something new. That said, the questions you ask really do matter. The questions above? They aren’t great. Why? They don’t lead anywhere except to more rumination, more worry and more what-ifs.

What would be better? Effective questions clarify what needs to happen and point you and your team to the things that are important and/or provide you with answers that create a platform for better decisions. When contemplating a new venture, product or direction, we have found the following questions useful:

1. What do we know? This is not what we think, but what we really know. For example, for someone considering getting into the cigarette industry, the data shows that this industry is dying and has been for 40 years. This space is not where most of us would decide to start a business today. Data about new businesses launches is rarely this compelling. It’s good to start with what you know.

2. What can we know? Let’s use my business in this example. When I considered starting my own firm, there was no guarantee that it would succeed. An 18-plus year track record of success in larger business was not guaranteed to translate to a small startup. In addition, I had an entirely new industry to learn. Once I was clear that owner/founder peer groups were what I desired as the first offering for my business, I asked the following:

• What percentage of new leaders launched?

• Of the group leaders who formed a group, what percentage was still leading groups 12 months later?

• How long did it take the average new group to start?

What were the traits of the leaders who did launch? Those who did not?

• To successful leaders: Would you go into this work today knowing what you now know? What do you wish you knew when you first launched?

These questions gave me a sense of what others doing the exact same thing had experienced and a chance to objectively assess how well my traits and behaviors lined up against those who had been successful before. It also gave me a sense of how likely it was that this would launch.

And for the last and maybe most important question:

3. What would you have to believe to do this? For some new entrepreneurs, you may recognize yourself here. You might have to believe that you will always regret it if you don’t try to build your own thing. In this case, it becomes “What will I start?” not “Will I start?” Some might have to believe that if this new business, product or acquisition is not a wild success (yes, success does need to be defined), they can make a different decision at 6 or 12 months. Identifying this type of assumption might lead you to start your business as a side gig to give it some time to see how the market responds and even how you like running your own thing.

Lastly, assess who you are. Twenty different business owners and consultants kindly spent 20-45 minutes with me chatting in the six months before I committed to a new entrepreneurial path. This may seem like overkill, and for some, it would be. But I believe in getting 60-70% of the data that can be known about anything before moving forward. Wait until you have 90% of the info, and you have waited too long. Get only 20%, and it’s likely you have missed some items that may make this easier or faster. Know yourself: Is 20% enough? 50%? Or does it need to be more? Figure out what you need, ask your questions and get going.

Originally published on Forbes.com April 17, 2018

The post Three Questions You Must Answer Before Starting Your New Business appeared first on Staci Tubbs.

Mastering Leadership, Anderson and Adams 2016

What if you could only focus on one thing each day, the same thing for a month or a whole year?  What would it be?   What would it not be? I work with a number of mid-market growth organizations and while the desire to just do one thing really well is strong for some, it feels impossible amidst the many balls most of my clients are juggling and the long list of initiatives that they “must” do.  Last week, I was out west working with a long-term client and partner and we took the opportunity to celebrate some great new sales wins. Several well-known brands have signed on as clients and more are lined up to land in the next quarter. I heard from every department head that the new sales growth is putting pressure on the business as the team continues to exceed their sales goals. It’s a really good place for this group to be. As I absorbed this feedback I reflected that 18 months ago and certainly 4 years ago, this organization was not experiencing a consistent, steady flow of new sales, despite having almost an identical team running the sales function throughout that time, so I wondered what had changed? When I posed that question and asked what they were doing right, his answer was simple: all I do is sell.

That led to a few more questions, what was he not doing? No technology, no focusing on operations despite the temptation with all these new clients, just sales. As the organization reached a new milestone last year they did what we used to call in my past life at ACS, divide and conquer. When a business unit had the potential for great growth, we would select a highly capable leader out of their current function and instead of giving them more, a bigger role, we would put them in charge of a smaller business unit that had great potential for growth. 9 times out of 10, it worked.  For this group the change did not require taking a person out of another business unit, it did require reducing the number of areas this leader owned freeing him up to drive the area that holds the greatest impact for the business, sales.

This contrasts strongly to a group I have just started to talk with elsewhere in the US. This operationally driven organization is short one key person – they don’t have an operational leader. Their owner is a visionary, brilliant and creative and he is neither good at nor is he energized dealing with the day to day of the business. For that reason, right now they have no true operational owner and the results show it. At best, they are operationally mediocre.

With this in mind, that structure determines performance, what do your results tell you YOUR organization is designed for right now? As we reach the halfway point of 2017, what do you want your organization to be designed to achieve for the remainder of the year?

Previously posted on Linkedin

The post Structure Determines Performance appeared first on Staci Tubbs.

You may feel that your year is nowhere near over. And at a high level,  I agree, there ARE 8 more weeks and fully 15% of the year yet to go. However, I expect that you have clear line of sight to year end. 10 months of financials have been completed and those books are closed. If your world looks like my world, clients have already committed to their big Q1 initiatives, and many have completed their funding approvals and planning for all their key initiatives through Q4 for next year. I was sitting with a client this week and his comment was I will be taking 3 of the remaining 8 weeks off this year off because my business year is winding down and I plan to enjoy the holidays.  For many of us, we really are on the threshold of year end. As I approach year end I get ready to do my personal and business reconciliation  and there are key questions that I want to spend some time on.  How did the year turn out? What were my revenue and profit numbers compared to plan and what did we achieve?  

I have been doing day long business planning sessions for over 10 years now in my business and as a result of that we have a nifty one pager to use throughout the year and that also facilitates the year end review. Reflecting on this is step one.

Despite the one pager being useful I have found that just reflecting on the goals in the plan does not capture all the notable details from the year so in addition, I have a few other questions that I ask myself and my clients.

• What are you most proud of from the past 12 months?
• What changed for your business this year?
• What changed for you personally?
• What did you learn?
• What was your highest, most wonderful moment and what was the low point?
• What is your intention (or aspiration) for 2017?
• Fast forward to December 31, 2017, what do you want to be celebrating? Think in terms of head, heart, body and soul.

Now that you heard about my year end practice, what will you do to wrap up 2016? What does your planning and preparation for 2017 include? Do you know what your “Big Rocks” will be for next year? Do you know what you want to learn?

Happy reflecting.

I love and use significant sections of “Unravelling” for my personal year end review by Susannah Conway. For those that want to dig deeper into the year that was, the Unravelling can be accessed at www.susannahconway.com

The post 2016 is history appeared first on Staci Tubbs.

Really, just stop it. What is it? You tell me.

Like many other people, I am a creature of habit and whatever lovely indulgence I allow to creep into my day once, then twice, becomes a minimum expectation for me. The teaspoon of sugar in my first coffee? Yep, eventually it’s in cup number 2 as well.  Hitting the snooze on my alarm so many times I can’t make the 5:45 am exercise class? If I let myself skip one planned workout a week for too many weeks I then begin to wiggle out of my planned workout two days or more.  My lifetime of experience feeling myself slide down slippery slopes has led me to have a practice of stopping one thing for a period of time once a year.

A few years ago, it was meat. No one was more shocked than I to find that a meatless existence suited me.  I do live in Texas, y’all. Some years it’s more exercise or different exercise, there have been boot camps, and triathalons, meditation, saying yes more (that’s a whole different post, I was single, it was not all good), coffee, going paperless, TV and a few others that long since past seem less notable.   

This year, I am giving up alcohol and sugar for one month. Both? Yes, both. Why would I give up alcohol and sugar in December of all months? It’s when my guy, Jon chooses to eliminate alcohol and much of the time I join him.

So, you might ask, knowing that this change does not always stick, why do I persist with what could be labelled an annual commitment to self – torture? It’s about willpower, self-control and what we can do that changes it. The understanding of the human brain continues to grow, and the book Willpower, by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney created a number of lightbulb moments for me.

One of the basic premises of the book is that you have a single bucket of energy for making decisions each day and when that bucket is gone, you move toward easier decisions or as I experience it, you cave. Out of this energy bucket come decisions about when you get up; is it 4:30 am to work out or 6:30 am and the dog misses his daily walk? Also what you eat for breakfast, green smoothie or donut in the breakroom and everything else about your day, the energy to make the decision comes from this same place.

The bucket determines if you give in to your 3pm sugar crash and whether you actually hang in for the last hour of work to get that final deliverable completed or if you stop working 30 minutes or 3 hours early because you are just tired of making decisions and thinking. Various internet sources estimate that an adult makes over 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day and adults make 226 decision each day just on what to eat (Wansink and Sobal, 2007). So how do you get more of your decisions to be the right ones for you and your business?

Baumeister and his team found that putting some decisions on auto pilot actually frees up MORE of the energy in the bucket for important decisions and they tested it, one of the Willpower tests was how long people would leave their hands in a bowl of ice cold water after certain decision making exercises to see their level of decision fatigue.

While all of this was useful, what had a greater impact was the discovery by Baumeister and his team about how you increase your willpower. And they found:

“that willpower, like a muscle becomes fatigued from overuse but can be strengthened over the long term through exercise.”

When study participants exercised their willpower even in unrelated areas, focusing on posture as an example, it increased their willpower and stamina in other areas of their life and over time allowed the participants to more consistently hold out against temptation even when their resources were depleted.

So what are the key steps to strengthen our Willpower muscle and protect the bucket?

1. Practice – exercising self-control in one area of life improved a participant’s willpower in other areas. Pick one area and practice. 
2. Precommit  – lock yourself into a path with a clear start date. 
3. Make it public.  You are less likely to let yourself off the hook or be derailed by outside influences if people know what you are working on. 
4. Make room for mistakes. It’s possible that you won’t have 100% compliant behavior in your experiment and it can still strengthen the muscle. Just keep going.

So that’s my plan for what I am going to stop and for a period of time put on auto pilot. It will be a cranberry juice and soda kind of holiday this year and I am looking forward to reducing my mind traffic by having a few less decisions to make. How about you? Are you a New Year’s Resolution setter? Any habits or behaviors you would like to play with stopping or starting?

Want a good “Stop it” laugh? Then check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw

Thinking about making some New Year Resolutions? Here is what the experts advise:  

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2016/01/03/making-new-years-resolutions-stick/#6ec8aae91807

The post Stop It appeared first on Staci Tubbs.

It seems so easy, we just need to be clear, get clear, gain clarity. Yet, clarity can be and feel elusive. We had our monthly Chief Executives meeting in Las Colinas last week and our Executive Workshop was led by Patrick Ungashick the Chief of Navix Consultants. Patrick has been at the table with hundreds of owners who chose to exit their business and he naturally brings clarity on this topic.

He asked just three questions at the beginning of our session and one of these was what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are you tracking? Our team gave a wide range of answers representing the diversity of businesses in the room. Sales, profit/EBITDA, A/R, New client acquisitions, Employee retention, Cash, Cashflow, Student starts, carrier payments and a few others. They are all good answers, clearly our CEO’s and business owners are  and  leaders. And yet, on another level many of the answers missed the mark for this conversation. Over 50% of our members are owners and unlike a large public company many had not devised a way to track their company value. And the value, not the growth of the company will determine their final pay day when they finally do sell.

It was a three-hour dialogue, so I am simplifying it greatly in this post. The other part of the discussion included selling as the market is rising, achieving certain levels of EBITDA to jump up to the next multiple and a range of other items and decisions that become important when you sell and that are often made years, sometimes decades before the sale.

My three big takeaways from our workshop last week were:

• Get clear on your goal. Is it to sell next year? In 10 years? To pass the company to your family? To hire a CEO and be engaged in a less active way? Gain clarity on what your ideal outcome is. 
• Identify a way to track your progress.   While most of our members were tracking growth, Patrick brought our attention to the 50 plus items that could make their companies more valuable that were not being tracked. This checklist is something they assessed their businesses against last week as a baseline and will now look at once or twice yearly to assess progress. They are now tracking Transferable Value. 
• Commit to your goal and create accountability. For some of our members they are already clear, their exit dates were a day and month rather than just a year.  Others redefined their goal from 10 years out to 2026 with a commitment to start using the checklist. For all of our group there is now accountability to move towards the date and goal intentionally to deliver top dollar and the best outcome for our owners, our CEO’s and their stakeholders.

Patrick has a new book coming out called A TALE OF TWO OWNERS, Achieving Exit Success Between Business Co-Owners. He can be reached here  http://navixconsultants.com/contact/ or here Patrick Ungashick Linked in.  

I work with CEO’s, founder and owners inside their businesses with their executive team to improve their business outcomes and with a group of non-competitive CEO in my Dallas, Texas peer group. Our group is designed to help members make Better Decisions, become Better Leaders and deliver Better Results. I can be reached at staci@stacitubbs.com

The post Clarity appeared first on Staci Tubbs.