Thursday, October 29, 2015

How to Hire the Right Person (Hint: Flip a Coin)

Hiring the right person can prove to be one of the most difficult challenges for a manager, new or old. I've had every possible outcome from hiring over the years.

I've hired someone who performed very differently on phone technical screens than on the job and spent a ton of effort trying to coach to skills that should have been brought into the job.

I've hired superstars.

I've hired people based on the recommendations of others, with mixed results.

I've hired people multiple times for different positions, where they excelled in some and less so in others.

At times, I have thought hiring might be as accurate as a coin flip.
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Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Is This Going to Be On the Test?

"Is this going to be on the test?" I can still hear my classmates (and me) as we asked that same question of various teachers. The intent, of course, was to try to see if we could get some inside track that would help us to maximize the effort we spent studying the things that would be on the test, while totally ignoring those things that would not.

The teachers rarely gave us a straight answer, though, and with good reason. Their expectation was that we treated all of the material in the class as if it were part of the test. As such, we were always paying attention and learning as much as we could.
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Monday, October 26, 2015

What's Your Minimum Viable Business?

Are you familiar with the concept of a minimum viable product? Basically, the product contains the core features and functionality required to launch, and nothing more. I've seen it misinterpreted in a way to try to deliver the minimum amount of work, but it truly should include the core required features regardless of the amount of work involved.

Over the weekend, though, I wondered: what would it take to create a minimum viable business? What required features would be needed to launch a business? If you thought about your business idea this way would it allow you the same benefits - to test ideas with minimal investment, maximize ability to capitalize on feedback, and speed the time to market? I came up with two key components. That's correct, just two.
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Friday, October 23, 2015

What's The Big Idea?

I decided to approach a meeting recently in a new way. We had some topics to try to brainstorm around, and I had an inkling that the results would end up in some of the "usual suspects" of conclusions and actions, only to lead to the same results that caused us to need new ideas in the first place. What was the new way? Thinking big.

Before the meeting, I took the agenda and brainstormed myself five "big ideas" around each topic. The goal? To drive the conversation in a direction it would not have naturally flowed.
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Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Death to the Autoresponder

Last week I wrote about the different challenges that I learned about through use of a Twitter autoresponder that I had been sending to each of my new followers. It proved to be an interesting experience, but on Friday, I decided ro remove that autoresponder on Friday, though, based on a couple of responses I got Thursday and Friday. One misinterpreted my question as some sort of a sales pitch (I'm not really selling anything - yet) and the other one somehow didn't get my autoresponder joke that accompanied the autoresponder.
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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

What's Your Conversion Rate?

You can measure any number of metrics, as thousands exist for you to choose from. In most businesses, though, one metric stands out as the first you should really get a handle on: your conversion rate.
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Monday, October 19, 2015

When Goliath Eats Goliath

If you've been reading the blog for a while, you know that I am a fan of beer. Usually, I'm seeking out some delicious craft beer when I am not brewing my own. I will, of course, consume a Bud Light hanging with friends, but I do generally seek out what I perceive as tastier options from some of the craft breweries popping up around the country (and several here locally in Dallas). However, the news story that Anheuser-Busch InBev last week made an offer to purchase SABMiller did not fly under the radar. The deal would reportedly give the merged company 60 percent of the global beer market and put them in charge of the top brands in the U.S. including Budweiser, Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite, unless challenged by the courts.
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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Building Your Team Around a Star Recruit

Every now and then, managers are faced with a unique opportunity: building a team from scratch. Usually, though, they are expanding slightly or replacing someone who has left the team, voluntarily or not. In some cases, the team acquires an extremely talented individual, which may require rethinking how to continue to build the team to function most efficiently. I may have been watching too much football lately, but most of the coaches and managers have the right idea on this front, namely, to build the team around the star recruit. But as a manager, how do you craft the team that way? Here are some ideas that can help you maximize the potential of your organization.
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Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Challenges and Change

A few weeks ago I tried an experiment. I set up an autoresponder on Twitter for the new people that were following me. I normally don't like autoresponders, but I thought I would give one a try and see if I could engage some people in conversation.

Basically, my autoresponder message asks all new followers what one thing could they change about their business to make the most impact.

The first thing I learned is that responses to autoresponders is incredibly low. I think I maybe got about 3 replies out of every 20 or 30 people. But I did learn some interesting things about what challenges entrepreneurs in the community.
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Friday, October 9, 2015

Survey Results!

Back around 100 posts in the middle of August, I surveyed you, the audience, to get some sense of who you are and what you like or dislike about the blog. It's been a while, but I thought it might be fun to share some of the results now that I've closed the survey down.

I'll save the marketing demographic results, except to note that it was interesting to me to know that about half of you are likely reading this on your laptop and the other half are staring at your phone right now. So hi there! I've put a few links in here to tweet at me and let me know your thoughts. Feel free to use them!
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Thursday, October 8, 2015

5 More Tips To Be a Smoother Speaker

A couple of weeks ago, I gave you a few ideas on how you could become much more comfortable and natural as a public speaker. Everyone gets called on to speak, and how you execute a speech or presentation can have implications for your career, determining whether you make the sale, communicate what you need to on the project, or teach the masses what they came to hear you talk about. Chances are, you will need to speak in public, so here are five more tips to make it go well.
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Wednesday, October 7, 2015

How to Get Away With Murder(ing Your Meetings)

I've written a few posts now on meetings, the omnipresent bane of office workers everywhere. We all hate them, and yet often, we all attend them without question. We sit through "death by PowerPoint" where slide after slide presents so little value to propelling business forward. We engage in endless discussion, entertaining the whims of those that just want to discuss rather than do. We allow meetings to clog as much as four out of five days on some of our calendars. So here's a thought: kill your meetings. Want to know how to get away with their murders? Try some of these tactics.
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