Extreme Succession Planning: The Green Box Exercise

When I was a Chair in The Executive Connection, I heard a story about a former TEC member.  A very successful business owner and family man, he was at the peak of his life and success.  A fitness fanatic and keen sportsman, his family were growing up healthy, happy and full of love, his business kept growing and his community activities were starting to bear fruit.  As an all-round success and a wonderful man, it was a shock when he suddenly passed away. 

As it happened, he had left a sealed envelope with his best friend, marked “To be opened in the event of my death.”  It was quite slim and contained just one sheet of paper with the words “Look in the green box at the left of the top shelf of my wardrobe.”  When opened, this box proved that the wonderful planning and foresight that had served him so well in life, was now to serve his family equally well after his life. 

This is the Green Box Exercise.

Many people feel that if they have a current will completed, their estate plan is organized. While having a current will completed is crucial, there are more important steps that every business owner should take.

The idea is that you have one place that all the information on the following check list is stored. It may be a safety deposit box, or a locked cabinet in your home. The Green Box is just a metaphor to define a storage place that is safe and that your loved ones and/or key advisors have access to.

Part of the intent of this exercise is to provide direction to your executors on how you would want your affairs, specifically your business affairs, handled in your own words. Yes, the will does provide the legal wording, but a letter in your own words to explain ‘the why’ behind what you are doing will go a long way to helping communicate your key decisions more effectively.

If you are a business owner, you need to make plans for your business as well. Some of the questions that people face in the event of a tragic emergency include: Who is left in charge tomorrow? What will your banker do? Who has the authority to make the necessary decisions tomorrow to make sure your business does not suffer?

These are big decisions. Having a business emergency plan process in place and documented will go a long way to assisting your company and your executors. This is why we feel the green box exercise is something every business owner should do. Find a safe place, and store all of the following information and documents in it. It will save your loved ones confusion and a lack of guidance that they would otherwise be faced with. 

THE GREEN BOX CONTENTS

  • Letter to your spouse
  • Letter to each child
  • List of 5 most important employees in the company & their Strengths/weaknesses
  • Off balance sheet deals
  • Organizational Chart
  • List of personal and business people that should be contacted in the event of passing
  • Deals in process and evaluation of them
  • Strategy that I am thinking about but haven’t told anybody about
  • List of Trusted Advisors and their roles (may or may not be currently working with YOUR company) such as Lawyer, Accountant, etc.
  • Instructions not addressed in Will
  • Copies of POA documents
  • Copy of Passport, Birth Certificate
  • Copy of all credit cards
  • Copy of physical property titles
  • Personal stock portfolio information
  • Details of Life insurance- personal and company owned
  • Details of all other insurance
  • Copies of personal property valuations (Jewelry, guns, collectables, etc)
  • Computer passwords
  • Personal financial statement
  • Extra passport photos
  • Medical/Dental charts
  • Funeral/Burial instructions
  • Mementos and to whom you’d like them given
  • Whatever else is important to your family or your business

Improve your sales by changing your performance metrics

What metrics do you use to measure your business performance? If you’re like us, you’ll say something like sales, profit, free cash flow, customer numbers, deal values and so forth. These are traditional measures of success and ones that we’ve been taught to work to all our life. But what if we’re missing the one metric that could actually make the biggest impact to our bottom line? 

Walt Disney famously said, “Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” How do you do something well? By making the customer happy. This is the metric we've been forgetting about all along. 

Yes, the bottom line of every business is directly impacted by customer happiness - so why in the world don’t we actually think about this more? Perhaps because we don’t think it makes that much of an impact. Well, we’re all wrong there. Which is exactly what Justin Dry and Andre Eikmeier thought when they decided to shake things up at VinoMofo, the company they co-founded. 

Dry and Eikmeier told StartUpSmart.com.au that that their previous metrics were putting the focus on the wrong type of behaviour and this wasn’t consistent with their company culture or values, so they ran a little experiment. Splitting their team into two halves, one half continued with traditional metrics and the other half started using happiness as a metric. 

The results? “Absolutely Insane.” 

The happiness-focussed team achieved around 30% better results and sales than the traditional metric focussed team. Pretty astounding after a few short months. But it's important to note that the benefit to the bottom dollar goes well beyond making one sale through making someone happy in the moment. 

Happy customers can generally be considered loyal customers and on average, a loyal customer is worth around ten times as much as their first purchase value. So when you secure a customer and you keep them happy, you can expect the investment to pay off in the long run. 

Furthermore, it is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one. So you’re essentially saving money and making money by simply investing in customer loyalty. 

So how can we take a leaf out of VinoMofo’s book and change our number driven culture to one that actually utilises the power of happiness? 

It's quite a significant culture shift for most businesses. However, there are some steps that every business can take to slowly integrate measuring customer happiness into our culture and metrics.  

 

1. Baseline Test - How happy are our customers? 

Do you ask for feedback after a transaction? Not a lot of businesses do. It’s quite an easy process and as long as everyone commits to the implementation process, it works well. So start by creating a form (online on your website or in print) and send it to your customers (via email for online surveys and via post for print surveys). If you pay for a CRM, this can usually be automated however if you don’t, ensure a staff member is responsible for finalising deals or orders and chasing up the feedback. If you’re stuck for what to ask, click here for some ideas. 

 

2. Assess the Results - What areas can we work on? 

Start to look at the results and if you need some analysis help, turn the qualitative data into quantitative data by giving answers scores from 1 to 10 based on keywords and sentiment. When you see the trends, whatever they are, take note of them and start to think of how you can maintain the already positive and how you can improve on the negative. 

 

3. Create innovative and productive ways to improve those results. 

It takes a few small changes by the work team to improve a customer experience. Checking off these positive experiences is a great place to start. 

  • Easy to navigate and use website 
  • Fast communication times 
  • Easy access support channels 
  • Phone response when required 
  • Problem resolution and solution time 
  • Delivering work within deadlines
  • Delivering work promised 
  • Additional or complimentary services 
  • Positive customer interaction (happy calls, enthusiasm, real conversation) 
  • Personal approach to customer relationship management 
  • And with some tailored solutions to the trends you saw based on your unique feedback, the improvements will come naturally. 

The most important thing to remember is that every business should constantly be collecting feedback from clients. Client feedback is all we have to guide us with our own business improvement. So keep it running smoothly and revisit it every three months - happy clients and a better bottom line will be knocking at your door!

How entrepreneurs can use government funding and support to boost your business

There’s never any harm in looking at alternative funding options to make some room in your cashflow, grow your business and invest in the areas that can make a difference. Even entrepreneurs who are doing well financially can benefit from business support programs through collaboration, innovation and alternative expertise. 

The recent volatile history of the Queensland government has led most of us away from looking to government resources when it comes to small business. However, there are a few programs and initiatives that you should know about. Here’s four programs available right now that could help you to take the next step in your business. 

 

Industry Accelerators Program

This offers programs to develop and market test new products and services that can increase productivity and global investment in Queensland. This program helps entrepreneurs to secure investment and obtain new customers. 

 

Ignite Ideas Fund

This fund supports the development of new or improved products or processes or services to secure investment, launch global markets and grow business. Funding of up to $250,000 per project is available to businesses conducting activities that prove your idea will work or to assist with identifying a market or investor for your product, process or service. 

  • Eligibility: Must meet criteria
  • Funding: $250,000 per project
  • Applications: Applicants can apply for round two on 12 September
  • Click here to learn more.

 

Global Partnership Awards

Supports collaboration between Queensland businesses and international innovators by offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to learn directly from overseas successes. By establishing strategic medium-long term relationships with global research and innovation organisations, Queensland businesses can be supported and guided in growing and expanding. 

Click here to learn more.

 

Commercialisation Partnership

This program places Queensland innovators in Chinese incubators to collaborate with global expertise, access top facilities and accelerate commercial outcomes. Placements run for 75 to 90 days. 

  • Eligibility: Queensland based businesses with less than 200 employees must meet additional criteria
  • Funding: $480,000 over three years or until program funding is exhausted
  • Applications: Applications open October 2016
  • Click here to learn more. 

 

DID YOU KNOW? One of the services Langano offers is assistance in writing tenders, proposals and applications so if you have questions about how to best position your business in an applications, get in touch. 

Returning from holidays? Here's what every business leader needs to do...

For every leader, there is a time away – usually a holiday, or perhaps a long sales trip.  This is also a leadership opportunity to make a good return to work, an influential return to work.

When you are away, the team hasn’t felt your influence for a while, and you have had the chance to get away from the daily whirl of activity – meetings, emails, texts, reports.  This gives you the chance to work on your business rather than in your business.  

Being away, your team grow used to not hearing or seeing you.  Your team start to focus on other drivers.  Now that you have returned, they can be more easily influenced.  They want to hear from you and this makes your first day back particularly powerful.

How do you best harness this power?  Surely not by working through the accumulated letters, emails, reports and papers – this just hides you away and squanders a valuable leadership opportunity.

Instead, as you return to work, focus on the really critical values and tasks that your whole organisation needs to align with.  Demonstrated values reflect how we behave, how we treat each other, our clients our stakeholders.  This is the opportunity to reinforce the organisation’s values, at the individual, team and organisational level.  

Reflect on recent performance, opportunities and threats.  Consider our strengths and weaknesses.  What are the top three tasks we need to undertake, not just to deal with today’s challenges but to be ready for tomorrow’s opportunities.  Think about success and what it looks like.   Paint a picture so that each and every team member knows what they have to do to achieve success.

Once you have these thoughts clearly in your mind, write them down.  Make the words short, simple and clear. Practice saying them out loud, turning them into your mantra.  Remember that for every seven times you say something, there is a chance your team members will hear you once.

Build a simple communications strategy around your chosen messages:

What will you say to your leadership team?  What do you want them to say?    What will you say to the organisation in your next leader’s message?  How is this communicated with clients?

As you now run through the backlog of work, consider each item in light of your message to the organisation.  Think about what is important and what is not.  Be comfortable that you are running the job and the job is not running you.

Want to improve your earnings by 20%? It's easier than you think...

Over the last two decades, our dependence on technology has increased. When we use technology, the mathematical chance of error is decreased, efficiency is maximised and we still have the power of being in control. The downside, is that for many people this has lead to the demise of our trust in the ability of others. 

We’re much more likely to turn on spell check than turn to a colleague and ask for proof reading prior to sending an email. We’re much more comfortable typing a question into Google than we are turning around and asking someone that question in person. We’re afraid of human error and losing control. But in today’s business world, we should be looking for harmony between technology and people through delegation and collaboration, not deterring from it. Why? Because the impact this has on our bottom line is a lot larger than we realise.

Thomas N. Hubbard recently wrote a Harvard Business Review blog about a study he co-authored with Luis Garicano that looked at the real, economic affects of effective delegation in the workplace. Using thousands of law firms across the United States, they found that when senior lawyers handed work down to their associates, median earnings increased by 20-50% more.

When the senior partners stopped focussing on the mundane, routine issues and handed this work on to associates, they could focus on larger, more complex cases and were able to serve more clients. This productivity boost through investing the senior experience into more valuable areas of the business drove these improvements to the bottom line. 

Forbes ran an interesting piece in 2012 quoting a London Business School Professor who said only 30% of managers believed they were good delegators and of this 30%, only 1 in 3 of their subordinates actually confirmed that they were good at delegating. 

That suggests an enormous number of business leaders are investing their time and effort into the wrong areas of their business. So how can we change the way we think about delegation, how can we trust our employees and utilise the good money we pay for them to improve our overall position? 

 

1. Make technology a team effort

Those pieces of technology I spoke about earlier on are incredibly valuable, but they don’t need to completely replace other people - other people can simply use them too. If you give a team the tools you use and create a seamless, error-reducing process there is no reason they can’t perform to the same standard that you do.

2. Be clear, concise but give them freedom to operate

I was once told that if you allow employees to succeed, they will thrive in their roles. Instruct the important things but allow them to create their own systems and styles. Give them operational freedom (within your business values) and they’ll take ownership for the work they do. It won’t be ‘something the boss gave them to do’ it will instead be ‘something they want to succeed at.’

3. Teach, don’t tell

The most valuable thing you can do is pass on your knowledge to free up your own time. Don’t tell an employee what to do, teach them how. This way, you have confidence when you delegate that they have the skills to perform well. 

4. It comes down to culture

If you create a positive delegation experience for employees, it creates a collaborative culture where delegation doesn’t become an excess workload thing, but instead an empowerment thing. Foster a culture this happens and there’s nothing stopping your business from improving. 

 

Do you have questions about delegation and creating a positive delegation experience in your business? Click here to send us a message and we’ll do our best to get back to you with an answer.