Kelowna a Success!

Last week Matt and I took the trip out west to train a bunch of young professionals on building an efficient and successful team. The challenge was called 'Assembling Success'. Now, we've done this exercise all over the world to over 150 people and this one had them all beat!

Without giving away all our trade secrets, the objective is loosely around trying to make as many products in the allotted amount of time. Typically we see anywhere from 1-10. I think the count on this team... over 30 (before the stealing rampage began that is).

I'm not sure why this team was more effective, but they sure assembled a successful team! Good work!












PS. Check out our new website - www.igniteyoursmallbiz.ca.

Not just a book anymore!

Ok, so we never were just a book, but now our website shows that. IGNITE Consulting now has a website with just a page about the book (Trucker Management for those that don't have a copy yet). It provides information on our training, speaking engagements and who we are. So have a peek - let us know what you think - www.igniteyoursmallbiz.com.

On another note, Matt and I are off to Kelowna tomorrow to do another training session for JCI called Assembling Success. Next week we'll post some pictures. In the meantime, we're still looking for training opportunities, so if you know of any let us know!

Listen to your CB - People are talking

Last weekend I participated in the Women's Art Festival. Throughout the day I had many people talk to me about the difficulty finding beach glass now a days with all the recycling and plastic. They also told me about all different sources of media talking about this.

I was completely unaware of any media covering anything about beach glass; and being a beach glass artist this is really important for me to know. I could be missing opportunities to be featured as an expert, showcase some of my rare pieces or even just be in the know when customers talk about the media story. So I may not have been successful in listening to my radio (in this case it was literally the radio, not just a metaphor, and some print) to catch the media stories, but at least I was listening to my CB and heard my customers talking about it.

Here's one of the stories one of the customers passed on to me from the Art Festival. It was in National Geographic Magazine.

PS - if you're wondering where the CB / Radio analogy comes from.. from our book Trucker Management.

Simple = Effective (The "duh" Factor)

Sometimes the most simple ideas are the ones that seem to elude us the most, but also prove to be the most effective.

I was in a parking garage in Ottawa this week, and saw an idea so simple in execution and so obvious in solving a problem, but yet is the only place I've ever seen it.

A common source of frustration, even comedy (thanks to a Seinfeld episode), is the notion of trying to remember where you parked your car when entering a large store or shopping mall. They have invented gadgets for our keychains to help us find our cars in crowded lots, and they have numbered and lettered lanes and aisles and levels of parking lots. Yet still we often seem resigned to the fact that this frustration is simply all part of the experience we face when entering such a parking lot or structure.

The one I was in the other day had a very simple wall-mounted dispenser beside the elevator of little paper cards pre-printed with the level, sector and side (east or west) of where you had just parked your car within this massive garage that spanned an entire city block. Those waiting with me for the elevator must have wondered a little about my sanity when I exclaimed "Duh! Of course!" out loud. But the idea, so simple, and so obvious once presented, struck me full on. How could this not be in EVERY parking garage in the world by now??

What aspects of doing business with you have people perhaps simply resigned themselves to enduring as an unavoidable part of the experience, that maybe, just maybe, such an easy solution exists for you to resolve this for them?

The Birdhouse Challenge in Jasper Indiana

Matt and I presented a full day of workshops in July in Jasper Indiana. Over 50 people were at the conference. One of the sessions was the Birdhouse Challenge where teams are paired off to live the life of an entrepreneur from start to finish, concluding with promoting their product. In the 70 or so times we have done this session, we have never had a team actually make a commercial...until now. So here it is.

How the dashboard came into play this week

Yesterday I submitted my letter of resignation as the Manager of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Centre. A big step. In doing so, the Dashboard as we discuss in Trucker Management was in full action:

1. Roadmap - a plan to get to where you are headed (I had a business case and had several critics review and challenge it)

2. Logbook - record of where you've been (I looked over my accomplishments over the past 3 years to see if I had completed my original objectives)

3. Fuel Gauge - how long can you operate with the resources you have (I reviewed mine and my families to see if we had the energy and ambition to continue on the same path or move on)

4. Battery Power Gauge - what contingencies are available? (This was really important, what if this plan doesn't work, what will we do?)

5. Trip Meter - how long have you been on this particular journey (When I started the position I thought I would maybe be there 6 months, not 3 years. I enjoyed it for a long time, so I stayed, but when it became 'work' it was time to leave.)

6. Air Vents - rejuvenation and refreshment (A need for this was at the core of the decision.)

7. Most importantly CB / Dispatch - assistance. Running any type of business, and especially starting something new takes a team (even a proprietorship). So this decision includes friends and my family's support and encouragement.

I am excited to see where this new road will take me!

Book Signing Event

This coming Thursday, June 5th from 5pm-7pm we will be doing a book signing event at Chapters (near Smitty's in Kingston) as part of their 10 year anniversary celebrations. Come learn about the book, future plans for Matt and I and get a signed copy.

Marketers are the ones that don't know what BRANDING is!

I recently went to see a high paid speaker who is one of Canada's most well-known and wealthy marketing gurus and I was disappointed - yet again the marketing world has confused what BRANDING really means. She spent half of her talk discussing how non-marketing experts have a hard time figuring out what branding means and that only true professionals really know how to define it. Well, she's wrong. Marketers are confused and everyone else has it straight; and I can say this after owning a marketing company for years. Marketers have made the concept so complicated and tried to appear smart, but have gotten so far from the true definition even they don't know what it really is. She was trying to say that branding is the way others would describe your company when they see an ad or commercial - in other words what's the word on the street about your business, and what do the employees say it's about. I would argue this is your culture not your brand.

A brand, plain and simple, is a marking (burned or not as you see below) that labels something to a certain person / business. In others words, no matter how hard marketers try to tell you it's not about your logo - it is! You design a brand and stamp it everywhere. Whereas your culture is created over time and can't be designed, it simple happens based on the environment you create about and around your business.

Here's the true definition of brand according to http://dnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn:

trade name: a name given to a product or service
identification mark on skin, made by burning
burn with a branding iron to indicate ownership; of animals
a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning
mark: a symbol of disgrace or infamy; "And the Lord set a mark upon Cain"--Genesis

Expanding your circle check...and how we broke our own rules!

I was driving past a bus stop bench in town the other day that had advertising on it, but with all of the snowfall we have had here, the sign was almost completely invisible. The poor realtor (I think that's what was advertised) who paid for that sign for this month has been tossing money away, since no one can see it.

If they had expanded their Circle Checks of their "business", to include any offsite locations where their business is "present", and checked in on this sign, they could have gone and cleared the snow away themselves, so that their money wasn't being wasted. Its one thing to do your Circle Checks around your "main" business space, but any other physical presence you have should also be regularly reviewed.

And we're guilty of this ourselves..... We had created a Facebook event for our upcoming Kingston small business training on March 27th, but we both failed to notice that somehow it got posted in Facebook as March 17th. It wasn't until a potential attendee told us it said the 17th, that we knew it was incorrect....despite both of us having viewed the page several times. More evidence of the need for Circle Checks - those objective timeouts to view things differently, where you can spot problems that you might not notice in a quick passing glimpse.

Aside from your office or shop, where else are you "present" that you need to check up on today?

Support for the Circle Check

Recently we heard a presentation about the principles of lean manufacturing by Jim Beswick of Calgary, who helps companies become more efficient and successful by focusing on the processes and aspects of their business that lead to things that are truly valued by their customers, and minimize the time spent doing all the other "stuff" that customers don't care about.

One of the tools he talked about was an observation checklist, a tool he uses with businesses to have people simply stand still for a moment and watch what goes on, identifying things that are not working well, or efforts that are wasteful.

We were amazed at how similar this approach was to our own Circle Check, a tool that forces you to take that objective time out and stand back to look at your business space with fresh eyes. This approach of taking a break to see things as you don't normally see them amidst the mad day-to-day rush of work and business, is a necessary step to get a full view of your business, whether its monitoring the conditions of your physical space as with our Circle Check, or whether its reviewing efficiencies and waste as with Jim's work.

When was the last time you stood back and just "watched" your business?