Succession Secrets

Welcome back Succession Seekers! Culture is the biggest determinant of a company’s success.  You shape the culture with the behavior you model and the values you embrace. The role of the culture is to institutionalize the values and behaviors that the business’ founders espoused to make it successful. With the right culture ingrained in the business, it can scale and stay successful even when its founders are gone. The good news is that culture is nigh impossible to copy and it cannot be faked. It is a way of being. Listen to my story about companies I worked with that had cultures of compliance and cultures of initiative and why and how they chose their paths. Question of the Day:  What type of culture are you attracted to and why?

Fear and Greed are the strongest emotions in business.  Greed makes us more optimistic than warranted, and what is safe. Fear makes us lose perspective,get paralyzed and occasionally over-cut our business, limiting its future. Listen to my story of how Greed pushed me to over-extend my business and the painful process of how fear brought it down to earth and what it did to my vision.  Learn how my employees reacted to the downturn in the economy and to the subsequent upturn, which took me by surprise. Find out how entrepreneurs can learn temper their fears and their greed. Question of the Day:  How do you handle your fears in business?

Sometimes the best salespeople come from unexpected places. Recall stories of eager waiters and enthusiastic shop assistants who get hired by entrepreneurs passing through town, to promote them to successful sales careers in their companies. A friend of mine is running a successful body repair franchise shop hired in from an insurance company.  He is has built a great book of business from his relationships at his former employers.  Listen to his story and how he is about to hire new markets into his company. His competitors are hiring extroverted car body shop managers who are good at converting incoming traffic into customers.  However, they are not great at channeling demand to their shop, not having relationships at the source of that demand. Listen to this episode of Succession Secrets to hear my story of selling businesses at premium prices to industry outsiders and to find out how my friend is about to double and triple his business in a matter of months, rather than years. Question of the Day: H

Selling is critical to the growth of any business.  Selling has to be ethical, as only ethical and fair behavior will give you the conviction, the confidence and the care for the client and customer that is required for you to be an all-in salesperson. You can only be a super-salesperson, if you believe in what you are selling. Listen to my stories of selling with belief and what happened when I lost belief in my product. Story 1: I was a rookie investment banking entrepreneur when belief  helped me sign up the owners of a construction company to hire me as their investment banker and sell their business.  They had been unsuccessful finding a strategic buyer, given the many issues the business had.  I developed strong belief that a management buy-in could succeed.  It was a long shot, but it eventually worked and the deal was a success.  Nevertheless, my experience of how hard the deal was to pull off prevented  to pitch that kind of deal in later similar circumstances. Story 2: This is about losing m

I just had a session with a client, who is aggravated for having to fire a couple of her employees. Firing is tough, but it is required for high-performing teams.  It weeds out non-performers  It “rewards” high-performers,and It puts medium performers “on notice”  Jack Welch instituted the 20:70:10 firing policy for each GE departments.  It served GE well.  Firing is healthy even for high-performing teams It keeps the leader engaged It facilitates “fresh blood” to constantly flow into the workplace It eliminates complacency Firing is often good for both employer and employee.  The former can maintain a vigorous workforce, the latter can move on to a fresh start sooner, armed with lessons. Firing doesn’t have to be negative, if it is done with COMPASSION. I have shared on the show my own personal stories of having to fire people and having been fired myself and how positively it turned out in each case. It is OK to fire of you CARE about your employees and help them find a positive path. Que

Entrepreneurship, building a business is not a linear process. It is made up of periods of experimentation, followed by failures, successes and more failures. Often the failures are more frequent, but if kept controlled, the occasional successes can create growth and progress. Building a business is a process of evolution. If you keep pushing the envelope in a forward direction, then you will eventually achieve results.  The key is CONSISTENCY. The BIG CAVEAT: You have to stay in the game. You must control your downside, so that you are still around when fortune eventually smiles on you. Listen to my story of survival of the2008-2009 financial crisis with my business. How I stayed in the game to live to see a successful 2010. Question of the Day:  What is your story of persistence to move forward?

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. – Franklin D. Roosevelt In leadership, fear is not helpful. Leadership means doing something first. In other words: being comfortable with discomfort.  COURAGE.  Churchill said: “Courage is the foremost oft he virtues, for upon it all others depend.”  Listen to the story of a leading tax attorney, who has recently been promoted to head the tax section of her law firm.  She is an excellent tax lawyer, but is apprehensive about whether she would succeed in her new role as leader, rather than doer.  She was promoted for a reason and her fears are probably unfounded.  She enjoys a splendid reputation as a business developer and has great support staff.  Listen to how she is dealing with the challenge of putting herself in vulnerable situations and stretching her resources to help her staff succeed in her path.  Question of the Day:  What is your stretch situation that would allow you to grow?    

If you want to be a leader, you have to develop your own confidence to run with the job.  It is uncomfortable to step up and lead, but you have to want it more to be a leader than your pain of discomfort in grabbing the helm. There are several reasons why leadership should not be bestowed upon anyone: It is costly to “appoint” a leader, if they don’t turn out to be one. Both financially and to the reputation of the owner / principal decision makers. Choosing a leader will disappoint other aspirants for the position, which is painful to the entrepreneur who had built the organization through direct communication with his direct reports. Selecting a leader in his stead can impact the identity of the owner, who may depend on the satisfaction of being the leader himself.  If no one report to him anymore, he may feel less of a player. A leader should start leading first and will be recognized as such later. Listen to my own story about stepping down as a leader when I sold my company and how the experienc

This episode is about the mindset of taking responsibility for whatever hand we are dealt and making the most of it. If you are in a privileged position in life, it only increases your responsibility to do and give.  You however will do best to embrace that privilege and try to make the most of it.  It is your responsibility.  It is no good to try about how much the world demands of you.   Make the most of it. Listen to my own story of the privilege I found myself blessed (and cursed) with and how I woke up to my responsibility to embrace it after a stint of being mugged in Barcelona and working at a construction site thereafter. Question of the day:  What is your privilege that you ought to embrace?

Andy Grove, CEO of Intel wrote a book titled: Only the Paranoid Survive. I have found degree of “healthy paranoia”very useful in my own life.  Listen to my story about a leveraged buyout deal that almost tanked, was it not for my paranoia, which saved it. My paranoia often caused me to wake up at 3am in the morning, in a pool of sweat, thinking of a client I had not talked with for a while and having a hunch that they may not be happy. Healthy Paranoia includes expecting the best, but preparing for the worst. George Soros and Warren Buffet both taught me that as long as we protect our downside, our upside would take care of itself.  Paranoia helps you protect your downside. Question of the Day:  How do you protect your downside?

Most of us try to grow our work output or business by: Working harder and more hours Trying to do everything ourselves Focusing on efficiency, rather than effectiveness ·     The way to win, however, is to do more of what we are good at, rather than to do more of everything. I am personally good at creating a vision, strategizing, writing, inspiring and getting better at speaking.  In the same time, I suck at: paying bills,bookkeeping, administrative tasks and responding to emails, among many, many other things. My way of growing is to try and avoid doing things that I don’t enjoy and not good at and focus on my strengths. Listen to my story of how I am trying to leverage myself, and how could you be doing the same. Question of the Day:  What are you good at and how can you do more of it?

The original interpretation of a “Partner” in a business is literally a “business partner”, also called as an active co-owner.   An active business owner is in many cases an entrepreneur too.  An Entrepreneur is defined as a person who organizes and operates a business, assuming greater than normal financial risk in the process. In most professional services firms, such as accountants,attorneys, advisors, etc. partners are shareholders, but in some cases there are “salaried partners”, who do not own shares. Typically “salaried status is an overture to full partnership, however. Listen to this episode to find out about partners in professional service firms that are partners in name only and how a real partner should be defined and selected to make these firms more entrepreneurial and dynamically growing.  (Hint: real partnership requires hassling and bringing in the bacon.) Your Succession is Success.

Delegation is tricky. Some people are unable to delegate. Others delegate too slowly, so that it doesn’t allow them to grow their organization at a reasonable pace. Yet others delegate too quickly, before they have figured out the process and delegation results in confusion. Less obvious, but equally deadly variety is when someone delegates the wrong things and their business stagnates and loses money as a result.  Listen to this podcast episode to find out how to choose what to delegate and what tasks to keep for yourself to achieve the best results. Your Succession is Success.

Welcome to Episode 13 of the Succession Secrets Podcast, where we're all about teaching you how to grow, groom, and graduate from your business in just 7 minutes a day! Today we will be discussing the importance of succession for your success. I believe that everyone should be working on succession at all times, because it means that you are creating more value, and becoming a more valuable person. Most ambitious people are continuously looking to grow in self-development, to become more effective and be more successful. Succession allows you to keep your work stimulating and exciting by always introducing a steep learning curve. It also allows you to leverage others and pass your knowledge on to them as you promote yourself to keep growing and building your business. Remember, succession never ends and it is a huge driver of growth and development. So how will you be incorporating succession for your success? Key learning points from this episode: Successful, ambitious people always seek to grow

About the 10 traits the ideal Vistage member possesses. What these are and why they are important for you to have / develop to fully benefit from the Vistage experience.

Why intrapreneurship is bunk. How I got fired as an "intrapreneur" and what I learned from the experience. Business leaders that are frustrated with owners that hold them back and the options they have to move forward in this situation.

I am reporting about my Vistage Chair Group event. A discussion of vulnerability, what it means and why it is important. How is not being vulnerable a weakness and an opportunity.

The narrow definition of succession is passing the baton as a seller, retiring CEO or a serial entrepreneur. The broad definition is to always be in succession mode. Succession to me means keeping the learning curve steep and always looking to graduate to the next higher level of leadership or life-fulfillment position, wherever you are. I don’t care if you never want to sell the business, won’t retire or will live forever. For every organization to grow, there must be upward mobility for the people in it. Your employees will only grow to the extent there is room for them and the good ones will not even join your organization without the prospect for rapid advancement. That means that everyone will have to constantly be thinking about working themselves out of a job and coaching others below them to grow into their jobs.

Different strokes for different folks and why it is important to define success on your own terms.

About how coaching REALLY helps CEOs and Entrepreneurs to be their best self...