Purpose: The Wake of Your Life

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Walter McIntyre

Wake Life

Purpose: The Wake of Your Life

Walter McIntyre

What is in the wake or purpose of your life. Is it littered with the pieces you broke off of people, or filled with people who are happy that you passed their way. It is not a rhetorical question. Your success as an individual and your ability to bring success to your business endeavors depends on the answer.

When your words and actions are out of alignment you are not authentic. When your words and actions are not in alignment with reality you are not authentic. Everyone can see it and you can see it yourself. In reality no one is fooled. The real danger is that your inner circle will follow your lead into something less than authenticity. It reminds us of the story of the “Emperor and His New Clothes”.

There’s a difference between “using” people to accomplish your agenda and “working with” people to accomplish your agenda. One leaves people distracted and disengaged. The other leaves people motivated and loyal to both you and the mission. Motivated and loyal people are essential to building a high performance work group.

It’s all about integrity. There are talented and smart people that have never had success in building something with real impact, past the immediate. Success that lasts longer than the southeast corner of this month’s financial sheet requires something in addition to talent and smarts. It requires integrity, driven by purpose.

Try these questions on for size:

Can you connect positively with others and build trust instead of seeing everyone as either a friend or foe?

Are you oriented toward reality?

Can you embrace failure as a integral part of success?

Are people/employees assets or partners on the journey to success?

Why do people follow you?

There are no absolutely right answers to these questions, but there are answers you will like better than others. Answers that make you smile. Answers that trouble you. This is all about self-evaluation, not judgment.

At some point, highly successful people define who they are going to be. That is when words and deeds have a chance to come into alignment. This is purpose. Once you have been exposed to, and embrace purpose, nothing will ever be the same for you. Decisions become easier and better because you have a fix on true North in your life. A journey you take along with people who are in alignment with your purpose will give you peace of mind.

Small Business Financing

Posted on August 26, 2018 by Walter McIntyre

Small Business Financing: (Which Option Is Really Best For You?)Equity, Debt, or Convertible Debt?

Written by Alex Liu

This article was originally published on UpCounsel.

https://www.upcounsel.com/business-attorneys

When considering small business financing, it’s important to understand all your available options. Otherwise, investors can easily take advantage of you and offer unfair terms. So before raising any money, learn if equity, debt or convertible debt financing makes the most sense for you to grow your business.

Equity

Raising capital through equity is a popular, if not the most popular choice, for entrepreneurs to pursue. Investors buy stock in your company, giving them a financial stake in the future success of your business.

How It Works

You set a specific dollar amount for what your company is worth.
Based on that valuation, investors agree to give you money in exchange for a certain percentage of your company.
Investors receive compensation based on the percent of stock they own once you sell the company or go public.

Pros

All your cash can go toward your business rather than loan repayments.
Investors take on some risk and don’t have to be paid back until you’re doing well.
Investors often have valuable business experience.
Since investors have a financial stake in the success of your business, they are motivated to offer sound guidance and valuable business connections.

Cons

Equity financing has the highest legal bills and takes the longest time to close, making it the most complex small business financing structure, says Forbes contributor and growth consultant George Deeb.
Selling shares of your company makes it very difficult to get them back.
You will most likely lose control of part of your board to your investors.

Debt

Debt-based fundraising is the form of small business financing most small businesses end up choosing, says Fundable. It’s also the easiest to understand. Money is loaned to you with the agreement you’ll repay it over time with an established interest rate.

How It Works

You borrow money with an agreement to pay it back with interest within a specific time frame.
You will also have to offer your lender some form of collateral, which are liquid assets you will give up if you cannot make your loan payments.

Pros

You will raise capital much quicker than with equity small business financing. This is especially true of smaller cash amounts.
You can keep 100 percent of your company, along with 100 percent of its profits.
Interest payments are tax-deductible.

Cons

You must be completely confident you can make your loan payments in cash each month. If you don’t, lenders can make you sell your business in order to get their money back.
Interest payments can become one of your largest business expenses.
Commercial lenders will demand small business owners to personally guarantee the loan and offer personal assets as collateral, even if your company is structured as a corporation or limited liability company, according to Forbes.

Convertible Debt

A convertible debt small business financing structure is a mix of debt and equity financing. The money raised is considered a loan, but at some future date the loan can convert to equity if the lenders so choose.

How It Works

You will negotiate an interest rate to pay back the loan. This will also be the interest rate for those lenders who decide not to convert any debt into stock.
The details concerning how lenders can convert the debt into equity are negotiated at the time of the loan. For the most part, that means agreeing to give lenders a discount or warrant on an upcoming round of equity fundraising.
You will also set the valuation cap, or maximum company valuation, at which lenders can convert debt into equity. If investors decide not trade in their loan for shares at this predetermined valuation level, they can no longer do so at a future date.

Pros

Transaction costs are low and the process moves quickly.
If you don’t want to set a company valuation, which involves a lot of uncertainty and risks for new startups, a convertible debt structure for small business financing makes a lot sense, says Covestor CEO Asheesh Advani.
Using convertible debt protects investors from dilution in future financing rounds.

Cons

Investors are uneasy giving money without knowing the exact share of a company they will own, and you might have to offer steep discounts on equity in order to get them to agree to the terms.
You may be forced to set a valuation before you are ready in order to avoid unaffordable loan repayment expenses.

In the end, it’s best you make your final choice, best on which specific option, works best for you, not just now, but in the immediate future as well.

About Our Author Alex Liu

Alex began his career as a scientific legal consultant and then as a journalist researching and reporting on health policy and health sciences. At UpCounsel, he enjoys researching and analyzing data to help businesses make informed decisions. In his free time, Alex is working on a documentary.

Reduce Churn by Keeping in Touch With Your Customers

Posted on January 5, 2018 by Walter McIntyre

Reduce Churn by Keeping in Touch With Your Customers

Churn rate is one of the best indicators of a business’s health. Also called attrition and cancellation rate, it is the percentage of clients who have discontinued and canceled a product within a time period.

In a perfect world, your company would have zero percent churn–but customers canceling is a fact of doing business. However, there are ways to reduce this.
In this post, we’ll look at some ways to retain customers better and reduce customer churn overall. These are pointers you can use to reevaluate your overall business strategy and review your customer playbook for sales, support, and marketing teams.
Be proactive

Many companies make the mistake of only communicating with their existing customers where there’s already a complaint (the customer reached out!) or when they want to upsell. Although this sounds atrocious, it’s a bad practice that’s very common across many businesses.

Sure, some customers don’t like to be “bothered” by companies and just want to be left alone enjoying the product. However, the only reason a customer would be annoyed by a company reaching out is when it involves one of those reasons above–a problem or an upsell.

Steady communication with your existing customers is important to retain them. This is not about a token hello. This is about letting them know that you’re taking care of them and that you are easy to reach out to in case they have a concern.

The other side of the coin is the valuable feedback that you’ll get from these customers–feedback that will ultimately help you improve your operations.

Make use of call notes

Call notes are very important. Make use of them so you can reach out to customers with context. This is why having a CTI–like for example, an Avaya integration with SugarCRM–in place is essential to a customer-centric operation that effectively reduces customer churn.

Integrating CRMs with phone systems allow your agents to log all customer information and conversation details easily so you’ll have access to them when you proactively reach out to your customers.

When you make that call or write that email, reference their account details, previous conversations, anything that can help personalize the call so they don’t feel like they’re just part of a routine roundup from a tall CSV file.

Ask clients for feedback

Make an effort to ask customers for feedback about the service they’re receiving and the product they are using.

Ensuring customers are getting what they are paying for (and more!) is key to keeping your client base growing and not the other way around.

Here are some ways to do this:

Social Media

Many companies provide customer support via social media but it’s almost always a reactive effort. Why don’t you schedule regular call outs for feedback on your company’s social profiles?

This is a moderately risky move if you are not confident with your performance as a provider because social media can make or break a brand. However, it’s one of the most visible channels for communication so strategize how to incorporate asking for feedback in your social media plans.

Existing customer segment in your email list

Any effective email marketing plan involves engagement with existing users. Make sure to segment your email list (i.e. move closed accounts to their own segment) so you can create tailored emails. Segmenting email lists this way allows your team to ask clients directly without having to do it manually.

Do this sparingly as this approach can get spammy really fast.

Feedback capture tools on your website

The company website is your front door. Most clients will come to your website first when they have a concern, whether it’s to talk to someone on live chat or just check out your help desk.

An underutilized approach is putting feedback bars or even surveys on your website to capture precious customer insights.

Personal calls and emails

When you close deals, it must a practice to create recurring tasks in their record on your CRM through your CTI integration so you can send personal check-ins with your customers to see how they’re using your product, what their concerns are, and what areas you can improve upon. Whether you’re using a SugarCRM Avaya integration or one of the hundreds of other CRM-Phone combos, getting a solution that allows you to streamline tasks is key to exploiting this avenue for feedback.

For all these approaches, be direct and make it easy for customers to provide their thoughts either. Ask short questions, and give answering options when possible. Be sure to acknowledge their feedback! Call back when possible.

Reducing customer churn is all about ensuring customer success. Use your tools to be in constant contact with your customers.

Ensure that your sales, support, and marketing teams are geared towards championing the success of your customers. Not only does this help you reduce customer churn, it also helps you convert customers to product evangelists!

Sean Pinegar

What Are the Important Customer Success Metrics

Posted on December 25, 2017 by Walter McIntyre

What to Measure

Ask anyone in sales or customer support regarding important customer success metrics, and almost always, churn is mentioned. Churn is short for ‘churn rate’ and refers to the percentage rate of customer loss or customer defection. And while this is an indicative customer metrics that we should all monitor, it is incomplete.

Guy Nirpaz, co-founder and CEO of Totango, says: “Churn is very important, but this is the outcome…. Churn, renewal, upsell, these are all the outcomes. In order to impact the outcome, [you need] to look at the leading indicators.”

So, when it comes to important customer success metrics, where should you look? We broke it down to two categories for you: customer health score and the other conventionally important customer success metrics.

Customer Success Metrics: Customer Health Score

Your customer health score reflects the key attributes of a successful customer. Score high; and you likely have a highly engaged and happy customer base. Low scores indicate that there are aspects of your product/ service and operations which need tweaking.

Customer health score tops our list because it brings relationships into metrics. We’re still looking at numbers here, of course. Yet, we also get a good idea of how involved customers are with you and your products.

Are they exploring your product’s different features?
Do they engage with you through your website, support channels and social media channels?
Do they regularly login and use your service?
Are they active customers with updated billing histories?
Are they positive about you when asked via survey?
Would they recommend you to their friends? (Also referred to as Net Promoter Score or NPS)

The weights of these attributes differ per industry/ per business. For instance, there are businesses where the NPS is more important than the level of user interaction or feature usage. Another common example is having a high volume of support tickets which, in some cases, isn’t really a bad thing. It is up to you to assess your operations and your customer engagements to get to the impact of these attributes to your true customer health score.

The end goal is to be able to identify crucial segments of your customer base: those who are likely to churn and those who can be approached with up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. You can then take action in response to these possibilities/ opportunities.

Other Important Customer Success Metrics

It is still important to keep your eye on a few more customer success metrics that have conventionally been regarded as important.

Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (or LTV), defined simply, refers to the revenue earned from a customer over a period of time. Keep in mind that this is actually a complex concept. You also have to consider the cost of acquiring a new customer, churn rate and value of up-sells, cross-sells and referrals to get to your real LTV.

It’s been found that LTV can predict success for subscription-based businesses. According to research conducted by Shopify’s RJMetrics, the top 25% of these companies have revenues of more than $600 thousand per month. They get 3.5 times more new clients, and are able to retain these clients for at least a few months. In these few months, 20% of their monthly revenues would come from repeat business. Trends point to the ability of these top 25% companies to retain these clients for around three years, increasing the value of their LTV.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
We mentioned the Net Promoter Score (NPS) earlier, under Customer Health Score. We are adding it here again because it pays to look at this customer success metric separately. Your NPS refers to the likelihood of your customers referring you to their friends. It not only gives you an idea on your referral, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities – or lack of. It also gives you deep insight on how happy or unhappy your customers truly are.

Take it from the man who started an entertainment empire with a mouse, Walt Disney: “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.”

Because, the reality is that your unhappy customers may not end up churning. But, will they help you bring in new clients? Are they willing to buy again from you? Probably not.

Churn Rate
Churn is still an important metric to track. However, don’t just settle for the number. It does not benefit you to only know how many people leave your fold. When you consider your churn rate, make sure to also look at “red flag” indicators, such as total number of logins, length of sessions, and time spent on individual tasks. Crucial indicators differ per industry/ per business. So, assess your business operations to pinpoint your “red flags.”

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Your CAC is the sum of several customer metrics, such as research and development costs, manufacturing costs and marketing costs, divided by your total number of new customers.

Is your customer acquisition cost higher than your LTV? If yes, then your business is in trouble; and you need to look at lowering your CAC and improving your customer retention rate.

Customer Success Potential
Over time, through customer metrics and your notes, you can gather enough data for accurate customer segmentation. Here, you can see which are best-fit and bad-fit customers. Bad-fit customers are those who are likely to have trouble with your product or service. They might take longer doing common tasks. They also engage your customer support often. This segment is likely to churn and it might be best to just let them go. What should alarm you more is if you find your best-fit clients churning.

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Dan Sincavage

Dan is a Co-Founder of Tenfold and currently serves as the Chief Strategy Officer. Dan oversees the Tenfold sales organization, manages strategic partner relationships and works with key enterprise accounts to ensure their success with the Tenfold platform.

Net Promoter Score Defined

Posted on December 22, 2017 by Walter McIntyre

Net Promoter Score, defined.

Patrick Hogan

Patrick is a Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Tenfold.

Net Promoter Score

When measuring customer satisfaction with a service, Boston-based consulting firm Bain and Company identified three major groups of people based on the scores they give to one particular question: are they, the customers, going to recommend the particular service they are using to friends and family?

Using a normal scale of 0 to 10 as the answer, a customer can fall into one of the following three designations:

Promoters – These are people scoring the service either a 9 or 10. They are active promoters of the product and believe in the service they’re using.
Passives – Anyone scoring the service a 7 or 8. These people are indifferent to the service or are neutral about promoting it to others.
Detractors – Includes dissatisfied customers and people who are extremely critical of the service. May suggest and recommend against the company and its products.

To get what is known as the net promoter score, a number that shows the actual range of satisfaction that customers fall into, the percentage of detractors is subtracted the percentage of promoters. Because it’s a difference, if the promoters and detractors happen to be equal, the net promoter score is simply zero and the product can be seen as lacking any kind of customer-initiated promotion.

Net Promoter Score as a Competitive Benchmark

NPS lends itself quite nicely to measuring a company’s performance against the competition. By knowing where the customer satisfaction rating of a business stands against its peers, it can understand what other customers do or do not see in its own offerings.

Bottom of Form

This is not just a “magic” number either: there is hard proof that companies that take extreme care of their NPS ratings experience better compounded annual growth against those who don’t.

Patrick Hogan

Patrick is a Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Tenfold.

The Importance of Listening Skills for Managers

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Walter McIntyre

The Importance of Listening Skills for Managers, by Jackie Edwards

Listening. Today, around 40% of employees do not feel valued or appreciated, and around 70% would be willing to accept an offer for another job or are actively looking. This issue stems from a difficulty in communication within the workplace which, as a manager, it is important to address.

While it is widely recognized that managers must be excellent leaders and problem solvers, a very important and often underlooked managing skill is also listening. This skill can make you a better and more effective manager; employees will strive hard to do their best for a manager who actively listens to them, leading to a more productive and motivated team. Here are our tips to help managers improve their listening skills.

1) Focus on Your Employees (and Avoid Electronic Distractions)

When an employee is trying to have a conversation with a manager, all electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets or computers are distractions. A manager may not realize this, but checking their emails during a conversation does not come off as respectful to the employee trying to convey a specific message. The speaker will probably feel unimportant and underappreciated and the manager might miss out on important information. Ditch the electronic devices to avoid distractions and focus your attention on the speaker.

2) Be Patient!

Even if you are dying to jump in and express your point of view, allow the person who is speaking to you to finish. It’s probably hard for the speaker to come in and start the conversation in the first place, and they may feel devalued if interrupted continuously. Listen quietly and express your views after the speaker has finished.

Furthermore, research has shown that managers that respond too quickly to statements made during meetings and discussions usually miss the point of what their employees are trying to say. When your employees have finished talking, repeat the key points back to them to make sure you’ve understood their message correctly and to reinforce it yourself.

3) Be an Active Listener!

Don’t focus only on the words that your employee is using; nonverbal cues can convey essential information if one knows how to read them. Look out for changes in intonation, volume, pace and flow and keep an eye on facial expressions and body language. All of these can be quite informative and reveal a lot.

4) Avoid Misunderstandings

We’ve talked about body language; just as you can gather information from the speaker’s body language, they can do the same by looking at you. Resist the temptation to roll your eyes, grimace or make a face.

Ask your employee to clarify if you really don’t understand what they’re trying to say and remain focused for the whole duration of the conversation. Selective hearing leads to misunderstandings as you hear only portions of what the speaker has said and you might miss important parts of the message.

An Effective Management Strategy

Remember, listening skills enable a manager to understand intentions and feelings of their team, an essential skill for team management. Your employees will be more open, positive and motivated if they feel they are being heard and will strive to do their best for the team.

The best managers don’t give orders; they are first of all excellent communicators, and effective communication starts with listening.

Objectives and Agendas

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Walter McIntyre

Whose Objectives are You Pursuing, by Walter McIntyre

Every person and every organization has objectives and a purpose. I am not speaking of the ones individuals profess or those an organization posts on their lobby wall. It is the ones you observe in action that count. These objectives, which are always related to an agenda, are not that hard to see and hear if you are paying attention.

I am fortunate to have been involved in leading a business turn around twice in my career. In both cases individual agendas and objectives were subverting the business’s success. In both cases, changing the focus of specific individuals, or removing the individuals from the business, became the turning point for business success.

You have to pay attention to what people say, and what they do, to see past the facade. To hear someone say they want to see certain business metrics improve, but their actions are about promoting themselves, is a dead giveaway. These folks will sub-optimize the business to accomplish their personal agendas.

It is a characteristic of highly successful individuals that they work hard to be the best at whatever they are doing. They move up the ladder by way of out-working and out-learning everyone else. They build a group of faithful followers who trust that the individual will give credit where credit is due and share in the benefits that success provides. They also take ownership of failures instead of blame shifting or excuses.

If want to build a successful organization, staff it with folks that share your vision and are willing to fulfill their own objectives by way of making the vision a reality. Avoid folks who are looking to promote themselves at the expense of others and the vision.

As for advice, I tend to avoid folks who are seeking a title or pay level. They tend to see the business as a means to an end. They check out as soon as they believe their agenda looks unattainable. Even though I have held the titles of COO and CEO in my career, I never sought them. They came as a result of working my tail off to make vision a reality and business successful.

Project Management Problem Solving

Posted on February 12, 2017 by Walter McIntyre

Project Management Problem Solving by Walter McIntyre

I hear the following a lot. “He (or she) is a good problem solver.” This is a great quality to have, but it is less than half the needed skill. It is better to be known for preventing problems. From both a time and cost prospective, a problem prevented is best, because solving a problem typically adds more time and money to a project, than a solid plan to avoid the problem in the first place.

In my current role I manage a project management team with a portfolio of between 40 and 50 projects. as Project Management Office team, we keep a list of problems we have encountered and spend a portion of our time each week developing plans to eliminate the problems from future projects. We address everything from scope creep, to time and cost overruns, to office politics, to known performance issues with specific groups and individuals.

The result has been a decrease in project cycle times, cost and defects. This, in turn, has increased the volume of projects the group can manage over time. Remember that successful project management means fulfilling the following:

What the customer wants/needs
On time
In budget
Defect free
Safely
Make a profit

We view each project from a value stream point of view. We even value stream map projects in advance, and update the map in the middle and at the end of the project. We can quickly tell what went right, and what didn’t, on every project. Using this information, we can build a control plan for project management.

So, don’t just be a problem solver. Be a problem eliminator.

Culture of Process Improvement

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Cultural Aspects of Six Sigma Process Improvement by Walter McIntyre

Whatever the process improvement methodology used, when properly applied, it produces a change in a business’s culture. Outlined below are some behavioral changes necessary to sustain a customer focused process improvement effort.

View the business as an organization of processes:
• If you view the business as an organization of processes, then managing the business becomes managing processes.
• Processes are interrelated and, as a result, they interact with each other. Changing one affects the others.
• If the appropriate processes are in place, managing those processes is managing people. Not the other way around.

Data driven business decisions:
• Business acumen without data is ineffective.
• Data without business acumen is ineffective.
• Measuring the right things.
• If you are not measuring it, you are not managing it.
• If you are not managing it, you are at the mercy of chance.

Voice of the Customer:
• Customer focused: Recognize that business success depends on customer satisfaction.
• There is a line of site from the customer to each business process.
• Customers see our outputs differently than we do.
• What we value should be in alignment with what our customer’s value.

Continuous Improvement:
• If a business is not continuously trying to improve, other businesses are either closing the gap or passing them.
• Using data to see where improvements are needed and taking action to make the appropriate changes.
• Avoiding change for change sake. Change is good when data indicates a need for it.
• Changes are in alignment with corporate values.
• Change requires empowerment. Both require trust.
• Improvement strategy is focused upon changing the processes. Changing people is a leadership issue.

Employee Culture:
• People change as a result of leadership.
• Employees are the most valuable asset in the business.
• Employee empowerment is the engine that drives process improvement.
• Employees must “buy-in” to the cultural vision.
• Employees need to see leadership “buy in” to the cultural vision.

Government and History

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Walter McIntyre

Government and History by Walter McIntyre

Our current day politicians seem to want to berate Washington, our government and everyone that is there. Don’t be fooled, all of them are trying to become what they criticize, insiders. These naysayers have lost site of the importance of knowing and understanding history. Actually, they should be embracing the history and talent that resides in our nation’s capital. Many decisions that shaped our history, and the modern history of the world, were made by men and women, in desperate times, showing great courage from political office or appointment. There is much we can learn from them. The same cannot be said of any other city in the United States, or any demographic involving corporate headquarters.

The fact is, decision making in a business is simpler, the purpose of a business being mostly two dimensional. The bottom line business metric of profitability and taking care of a small demographic of stakeholders is the focus of a business. Government must consider all demographics, on shore and off shore. Government is about “We the people…” (All the people), business is about “we the stakeholders” (not all the people). You will never see “We the people…” in a corporate mission statement.

Decisions in government are multi-dimensional. What might help or solve one problem can create problems elsewhere, which can be a big problem for government and can impact the trajectory of would events. Business,on the other hand, may want to be disruptive to other businesses for their own benefit. It is a completely different paradigm.

Regardless of your political persuasion, don’t be fooled into following “want to be” leaders that are either ignorant of our history or or want to run the government like a business. History is the map we followed to get here and government is not a business. It is much messier, by necessity, than a business and must represent all demographics. It’s is the government “of the people, by the people, for the people”. That means all of us.