Take Note…

Building and Sustaining a Successful Business
The CEO Formula! 

As owners and business leaders we constantly struggle to find ways to make our businesses successfully rise to the top and blow away the competition. Many business experts have written books on this topic and consultants generate millions of dollars in revenue each year helping companies find the secret formula. Sometimes answers to the most complex issues can be found in the most basic of common sense factors.

Have you ever ordered a dinner salad with oil and vinegar on the side? If you add too much oil and not enough vinegar you get a pretty bland outcome. Add too much vinegar and not enough oil, get ready to pucker up and grab the ice water. Mix the proper blend and viola!, your taste buds are now primed for the main course. There is also an appropriate blending of three critical elements in your business that will also prepare you to enjoy the main course. What are these three magical elements? Using your secret decoder ring, they can be found at the top of your organizational chart.

Continued from email...

Let’s take a look at the top of your organizational chart. We have the CEO – Chief Executive Officer. But for those who are seeking to find the secret elements, CEO represents CUSTOMERS – EMPLOYEES - OWNERS. When your business culture, business practices and business decisions provide harmony between these three critical elements, you have your winning formula. Simply put, a decision that is good for the customers, good for the employees and good for the owners has a pretty high probability of being a home run. Too much of one and not enough of the other will generally take you back to the drawing board at some point.

One entrepreneur who built an empire on his own formula that in many ways emulated this CEO concept was, Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. Sam grew up poor in a farm community and learned the value of money and perseverance. When Sam died in 1992, the family net worth approached $25 billion. Here are 10 rules Sam used to provide harmony in his business:

1. Commit to your business – Bring passion to your work.
2. Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners – In turn they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.
3. Motivate your associates – Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.
4. Communicate everything you possibly can to your associates – The more they know, the more they will understand. The more they understand, the more they will care. Once they care, ther is no stopping them. If you don’t trust your associates to know what is going on, they’ll know you really don’t consider them partners.
5. Appreciate everything your associates do for the business – All of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them.
6. Celebrate your success – Show enthusiasm always.
7. Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking – The folks on the front lines, the ones who actually talk to the customer, are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there.
8. Exceed your customer’s expectations – If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want and a little more. Don’t make excuses.
9. Control your expenses better than your competition – You can be brilliant and still go out of business if you are too inefficient.
10. Swim upstream – Ignore the conventional wisdom. There is a good chance you can find a niche.

Is your CEO in harmony? Only you have the answer to this question.

Client Testimonials…

“Jen and Susan are two of the best customer service people I have ever dealt with …helping me through my current cash flow to get my policy reinstated was really appreciated.”

J. Barber (Cleaning Services Client, Massachusetts)

Industry Speak…

Timeless Sales Tips

• Always tell the truth.
• Always be prepared.
• Know your prospect’s business, their business language, and their competition.
• Tighten your value proposition.
• Realize your prospect already knows your competition. and what they offer…
• Earn the credibility it takes to get a meeting.
• Everyone’s time is precious – especially yours!
• Be available.
• The second best four letter word is SOLD – the best is PAID.
• Never sell anything you wouldn’t buy.
• Respond fast – be known for it!

Interesting Tidbit…

Does the word Intego have a specific meaning?

The word Intego is from Latin and is defined as: Intego – I. To Cover and II. To Protect

In the language Kinyarwanda (spoken in Rwanda) it is also defined as – Achieving goals