Steve Huey’s Blog

I believe one secret to success is to constantly try things and then adjust and try again.  Fail Forward Fast! Make a lot of small mistakes.

I like this story about Edison and the light bulb filament:

“Like Edison responded when asked if he would give up after ‘failing’ 700 times to create the filament for the light bulb… He responded that he did not fail, but instead discovered 700 ways that didn’t work.”

To survive today you have to try new things and you have to adjust rapidly.  Keep this in mind and try to build the fastest feedback loop possible.

What if you could only give a friend, a student, your son, or daughter one piece of start-up advice, what would it be?

That is the question I will put to the business leaders in Louisville.  I will blog some of their answers and assemble an ebook from the rest.

My answer is the following:

Figure out the one metric that drives your business.  The one thing that keeps the cash flowing and measure it.  Track it relentlessly.  Focus your entire organization on that one metric.  I will give an example.  A restaurant owner calls in on a Friday night at 7:30 and asks, “What is the wait for a table?”  That one question can tell her how business is and give her an idea as to the revenue for the evening.  How can the wait do that?  The answer is simple – wait equals how busy the restaurant is which translates to people in the store, which when multiplies by the average check equals the cash take.

When you identify the metric that drives your business, and when you focus your entire organization on that metric, then the company moves as one.  One purpose, one aspiration, a single goal.  Know the metric, focus on the metric, drive the metric.

How would you answer the question? – Let me know.

What are the top ten lessons learned in 2009 that will be useful in 2010?  I think the following:

1. Establishing TRUST is the #1 biggest thing in business.  Without trust no business can take place.  Work hard to earn it and guard it like the gold it is.
2. Building a fluid culture will do more for your business’s survival than any other corporate value.  Building an Adaptive Culture that is unafraid of change means that you can be more responsive to changes in the market place – 2009 has been that if nothing else.
3. APIE is the answer.  What is APIE it is in essence Six Sigma, Continual Improvement, etc.  APIE stands for Assess, Plan, Implement and Evaluate.  Constantly striving to be better makes you better and builds on an Adaptive Culture.
4. Training and Cross Training helps the people in your business get better.  Better people = better service = Happy Clients.  They taught me about the importance of Cross Training at Wendy’s and I have only recently (2009) remembered the principle.
5. Repetition of core concepts helps people digest the message.  I view repetition as the key to communication.  It is not effectively communicated if you only say it once.  Think about this – when a fire breaks out in a crowded theater does the person only say it once?
6. What worked yesterday (yesterday’s value) does not not work today or in 2010.  If you rely on the methods of the past you will not deliver on the promises of tomorrow.  In order to add value a business has to add more value than yesterday.  Ask GM if it is OK to sell a car today that does not have air or power windows.  Better yet ask GM if they can even sell a car where that costs extra. (You may be asking if they can sell any car which is also a good question).
7. Look Back every once in the while.  Remember what worked and where you came from to appreciate your efforts; to remember success and failure.  It is good to remember the past but not to focus on it.
8. Excellent Failures beat Mediocre Successes – to borrow from Tom Peters who no doubt borrowed from someone else.  It is only in excellent failures that ground breaking opportunities are born.  A mediocre success is just that mediocre.
9. Build Raving Fans – You can interrupt people and tell them what you have to sell (Classic Marketing), you can beg (or pay) someone to tell your story (PR), or you can build Raving Fans by offering a unique or unexpected service that wins Raving Fans or Promoters and they – your clients – can sell for you.
10. Create more VALUE than you take.  I call this the secret of life – give more love =get more love, create more value = get more value.

These ten things are what I am going to remember in the new year.  I hope your New Year will be more successful and happy than 2009.

What standard do you set for your company? To be better than your competition? What about the three people in a garage? Ask Craig Newmark!  He blew away multiple Billion dollar industries with a free or almost free product.  I bet no web company – Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo thought that anyone would come along and snipe them out of a market.  Craig did with a staff of less than 30 people.

You must cannibalize yourself before others do.  Do you have a weak spot that can be exploited?  If so it will be.  I am not advocating selling you high end product for zero dollars.  What I am suggesting is that you must make sure that your point of differentiation provides real value.  Newspapers classified ads created real value for a hundred or more years but when confronted with new technology they stuck their collective heads in the sand and hoped it was a fad.  Their real value (providing reach in a local community) was eliminated and became a commodity.

Trends that will kill your business move slowly until they don’t.

If you take Jim Collins’ word for it and believe that great companies first ask who getting the right people on the bus, then you place a large value on people.  I agree with Jim that people are a company’s largest investment.

I served as the head of Human Resources for a publicly traded company during 2001 and 2002.  During which time I spent the majority of my time fixing policy errors, hiring mistakes, compensation issues and other abuses of my predecessors.  I learned a lot about people management during my stint with the company and have assembled a list of talent management “MUST DOs” :

• It is not “HR” it is Talent Management (start by placing the right adjectives on it)
• Talent management is every managers responsibility not just three clerks in a corner.
• Discussing people or the team is always a priority – building a great team is the same as building a great company.
• When the team comes to you and tells you one member does not fit – they don’t PERIOD!
• Invest in the talent – training is to people as repairs and maintenance are to plant and equipment – you certainly oil machines – so to do you need to “oil” your talent.
• All salaries do not have to equal but they do have to be equitable.  You better be able to justify salary differences.
• Bonuses must be tied to two things – first company performance and then and only then to individual performance.  It does no good to award personal performance if the company is failing. – The extra credit part of this is that I actually believe that client performance should be first but that is another topic.
• The head of Talent Management must sit on the executive team.
• Once a year for feedback is not acceptable.  Feedback must be given every single day!  Great coaches are constantly giving feedback during the game.  Why don’t managers? They were never taught to give direct constant feedback.

If you take money the people whom you take money from have influence over you and you are not – no matter how much you think – independent anymore.

Today we celebrate our country’s Independence.  It was declared this day but we did not earn it this day.  we earned it over the coming years and we still are earning Independence.

A company is much like the United States.  You can declare Independence but you have to earn it every day by having positive cashflow.  Right now is a horrible time to raise money.  You give up more Independence today than ever before.  Stay cashflow positive – stay independant.  Stay cashflow positive stay alive!

If you are not cashflow positive I challenge you to make your own Declaration today and work for it.  Freedom and Independance is a great thing!

Remember a while back that the Mission Statement was thought of as the thing you had to have to effectively run your business.   Then they fell out of favor because they became long corporate type meaningless Hooey!

The idea of the Mission Statement is not wrong!  It is not Hooey!  It is just that people lost their way in creating them.  The Mission Statement became this public declaration to be issued in a press release for the world to see instead of a becaon for the people of a company to ralley around.

We must get back to making the Mission Statement be a ralleying cry to have the people in your company gather around.  A single unifying statement that has purpose.  A mission statement is written as a press release.  A MISSION STATEMENT is written for the members of your Tribe to ralley around.  A MISSION STATEMENT can unify your team, help guide their actions, give them the internal strength to say “No” to bad customers.

A mission statement is a scourge.  A MISSION STATEMENT is a Savior!

The 135th Kentucky Derby was run yesterday on a sloppy track, in the cool air, on a cloudy day.  It was hardly the best weather for the world’s greatest horse race.  As it turned out it was a perfect day for a “Long Shot” to win.  Mine that Bird waited for an opening and then doing something that most don’t slipped in through a whole on the inside of the track to became a 50-1 winner of the Kentucky Derby.

The conditions set up the Long Shot win.  Just as the current economic conditions are setting up opportunities for long shot wins all around us.  I sat in a pitch for a real estate fund – raising ten million to take advantage of “Fire Sales” currently available in the market place. 

A colleague sat in a reunion presentation where the dean of the school stated that now was the time not to cower in a hole but to boldly step forth and take advantage of the opportunities that the economy has produced.

I agree with the dean.  Now is the time!  It is a sloppy track out there right now and right NOW is the time to be bold and make your move.  Long shots do pay and usually it is in sloppy conditions.

The number one thing you can do to build a great company is to build a great team.  I call this the “FIRST FACT”. 

There have been tons of books written on this topic and on the fact that building a great team is the most important thing a manager can do.  Good to Great put forth “first who then what”.  The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is devoted to getting the team to work better together.  The whole “Strengths series” is dedicated to either finding your strength or you peoples strengths.  Book after book expounds on either how to build a team, pick a team,  or wring the most out of your team.

So why do we forget this simple First Fact. 

Every day you should be working on the FIRST FACT.  Here are my thoughts on what you should do:

1. You should work every day to attract the right people to your cause – Tribes by Seth Godin is dedicated to the idea that we need leaders who can do this.  Find people who have diverse skills and actually believe in what your company does (simple for what your company’s mission is).
2. Make the people around you better.  Each person you manage should have a development plan.  You should have a development plan.  What can they do to be better?  What five things should they be working on to be better?  What can you do to help? 
3. Build the team!  You have to continually Build TRUST, promote constructive CONFLICT, promote COMMITTMENT to results, establish within the team ACCOUNTABILITY and focus the team on RESULTS that further the cause.

I encourage you to start tomorrow by thinking of the FIRST FACT and how you can help attract great people, make them better, and help them work as a team.

 Define for me the qualities of a place where you would like to work.

Here are mine:

• Where we can have fun, 
• Where we work as a team, 
• Where hard work is rewarded, 
• Where we can make a difference, 
• Where we are challenged and can grow.