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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Blog, Business Therapy — No Comments ↓

No, I don’t want to be morbid or bum out my followers looking for sage business council. Hey, my favorite webcast these days is John Krasinski’s Some Good News so I agree we have to keep our spirits buoyed but a grim reality that is, and will be, surrounds us. That is death, it is part of the story and part of life yet when it is so ever-present it gives us reason to consider it’s facets. That preparation, for all its presentations, may well be the difference between tragedy and disaster. Though unwelcome it is wise to deal with it before it’s upon you.

Death in the Spring of 2020 has several considerations. While there’s enough tears shed today in living stress and apprehension (as the spouse of a NYC hospital nurse I live that daily) there’s also a time for sobering looks at the worst subject of all, people are dying in abundance. That means a well-adjusted mind can consider what can be done in anticipation. While always hoping for the least possible impact is good, have you heard the “prepare for the worst” cliche enough to drive you to action?

The impacts to consider are first, your own mortality. While most people with even modest means are aware of life insurance and health insurance as bedrock responsibility only about a quarter of our working population has a valid last will. It does correlate higher to age and wealth and the idea that with much to lose comes much responsibility to disperse and manage. Regardless of what you own and how your state manages estates there are likely things of both monetary and sentimental value that if addressed in advance can present piece of mind should illness arise. Simple things like a list of contacts, papers and passwords that can be document and kept in a “Just In Case” envelope where it is known to be can be of great impact, god forbid.

Similarly, less than 20% of the adult population has documented end of life wishes. That could play out with resuscitation, remains handling or other issues but why it is so crucial around Covid 19 is so many pass away while intubated and unable to communicate or have family bedside. Going through the exercise when healthy is not just preparation for uncertainty but it connects you to what is important to you as you live your life, hopefully for a very long time.

Your own mortality is surely your responsibility and, like it or not, it’s never an if only a when, today’s plague has simply brought that into focus. The more likely dealings with ultimate loss however, are going to present as loss of friends, family, co-workers, colleagues and if not direct relationship what are the odds you’ll escape a second degree of separation?

Work at home is removing much of the communication stream from business the chances are something near past normal will eventually return. What will tragically transpire in the interim? Like commanders in war battles a human inventory of what has happened will be required. With memorials and farewell services missing, postponed or virtual there will be a new paradigm in dealing with grief. Have you thought about that?

The truth is that even if death does not directly touch you we have to acknowledge that in many cases the threat of death, the news of death and fear of death will have a psychological impact for many. Hopefully it will be a peaked temporary condition but lasting impact to some degree is more likely. I was walking across 5th Avenue on my way to my office on September 11th only to look downtown in befuddled horror as smoke filled the downtown horizon. Those events played out in a compressed sequence, a quick stab compared to today’s thousand cuts. Yet it was when I went with a colleague and friend to try and donate blood late that afternoon that something hit me. The lines were around the block with the best intentions of gracious souls when a hospital worker came out and said their blood bank was full and they weren’t expecting to need it. There would be no mass injured only dead and living. I remember thinking I knew things would now never be the same, and they weren’t.

On the tomorrow when we awake from this world horror we will all surely know the same to again be true. What we knew will be forever changed and thus so are we. Death will be a part of that reality, perhaps we will celebrate if we curtail the ghastly predictions, hopefully we will. Still, for many there will be no escaping the final plight regardless the mitigation. If it is your destiny I hope you have, or will now, prepare as best you can. That means minimizing your risks, taking care of your physical and mental self but also (legally) documenting your final wishes. It also means that as we reconnect we will have to assess the battlefield damage. The counted losses may turn out to be easier to deal with than the PTS that may lie in wait.

Being prepared to get back to normal best and fastest means having been prepared to deal with the impact of what has become far from normal. It is not to be dwelled upon or a cause for depression but is there to be considered. The hardest part of the human experience is loss. How we minimize our loss on others and how we will help others survive their loss whether in business or in personal circles we can’t leave unspoken what is critical to comprehend and plan for. It’s my hope whomever reads this will be spared the turmoil but acknowledging obstacles is the first step to overcoming them. Be safe, be well.

©2020 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. Our current book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Personal Performance — No Comments ↓

There are no such things as “wrong” feelings. In this unprecedented time of uncertainty, stress, worry, anxiety, loneliness, loss of income, personal safety, family health…you’d be crazy if you didn’t get at least a little down! There can be a great difference between what is a natural, forgive the expression–normal, response to such crisis and a lingering feeling of hopelessness, worry or sadness. Is there a cure?

There are no such things as “wrong” feelings. In this unprecedented time of uncertainty, stress, worry, anxiety, loneliness, loss of income, personal safety, family health…you’d be crazy if you didn’t get at least a little down! There can be a great difference between what is a natural, forgive the expression–normal, response to such crisis and a lingering feeling of hopelessness, worry or sadness. Is there a cure?

Depression can be every bit as painful and damaging as a virus and it can be a part of life even in the good times. It is a legitimate medical condition as well as an emotional state and this article is no substitute for treatment for a serious condition, that is a job for medical professionals not a Business Therapist. Still, there are strategies that can be extremely useful to minimize the negatives and if you are feeling any of those emotions perhaps one of the strategies here can be helpful so that depression is a short stop at most and not a new place to stay.

First, for workers, many have seen their economic reality change literally overnight. Regular paychecks, commissions and employment itself may have been delayed or ended and nothing causes stress for individuals and families any worse than money and that stress unattended easily morphs to depression, sometimes seriously. It is understandable because the stakes are high and there is no magic pill Some try taking one, getting high or drunk is an avoidance strategy but what often starts as a seemingly understandable response, a healthy “WTF” night to blow off steam, may quickly become a dependency and obviously that will create new problems while the underlying depression still lurks. A clear mind is the best hope for a happy body.

For executives and business owners company survival, built dreams and a way of life can be at stake. The smart battle actions suggest adapting sales and revenue strategy to the new, albeit temporary [hopefully] market conditions [see my last article]. On the “what you can control” side protecting liquidity and doing all you can to manage costs of course makes sense but that likely means tough choices. Many business owners and leaders are not only worrying about the impact on their business and livelihood but can be dealing with the reality that what they have to do to survive often dramatically impacts employees, vendors and even customers who have had a financial dependency. That stress can thus be two-fold, the effect on you and the impact on others you may feel responsible for even when you know there was little choice.

For everyone, personal and family health is now a universal concern. No amount of wealth insulates you from a virus and short of becoming a literal hermit we can’t control all the risks. Many are staring those risks head on in far more dire circumstances, Personally my spouse is on the front line as a nurse in a prominent NYC hospital. Our kiss hello and her hug of our son won’t happen until she’s showered upon arrival and even then it’s modified in loving caution. Chances are, however, if you are dealing with an actual sickness for you or a loved one your emotion is less likely to be about depression so that’s a different article!

KEYS TO BATTLE CORONA DEPRESSION

HOPE – You don’t have to be Pollyanna to feel that things will get better. Hopelessness can be a depression trigger so you will serve yourself well by having a VISION OF HOPE. False hope can, of course, be damaging but finding reasonable ways to be optimistic projects it will only be a matter of time before the circumstances improve. Worrying about something in advance never really softens the blow and “I told you so,” is a hollow victory unless it is pointed toward a better tomorrow, or next month, or next year but close enough so it can be seen. Projecting hope and realizing it is a double joy.

EMBRACE SACRIFICE – Few of us have lived our lives in isolated minimalism so real sacrifice may feel new. When was the last time you watched your toilet paper supply so closely?! On the other hand, most of us have lived through past wishes and abrupt realities and somewhere in our journey made sacrifices in order to achieve. The sacrifice you are making today should be seen as the stuff of tomorrow’s silver lining. Prove to yourself you can be tougher than you thought and know that the path to survival with sacrifice makes you appreciate the success to come. Consider it an investment in your future happiness.

GIVE – Nothing gets you out of your own misery better than finding ways you can help others. That may be a $5 donation to something that has meaning to you, maybe it means being willing to volunteer for the front lines though that’s clearly not for everyone. Giving of yourself can simply mean going through your contacts and reaching out to the people that have meaning in your life and share. While misery may love company giving a few minutes of your time to spread well wishes, check in, listen, empathize, and share hope gets you outside what may self-obsessing. If you are going for groceries does your neighbor need a few things? Got extra supples to share? Kindness doesn’t have to be at a big cost but it does have a big reward.

LIMIT EXPOSURE – I’m not talking about Social Distancing I’m talking about News Distancing. In crisis time there is no end to the repetition of disturbing news and facts. While we are seeing developments often hour by hour, exposing yourself to an endless stream of bad news can wear down the cheeriest of souls.

POSITIVE COMMUNITY – Social Media can be a place to vent but more often than not you will find things to make you want to scream in far greater abundance than positive emotions but those screams rarely change anything. Of course connecting with your personal and professional network via social media can be a happy strategy but edit yourself. Don’t feel the need to dwell on correcting opinions or joining the blame games. Skip through those posts that want to engage you in rage or hopelessness and look for humor and happiness being spread, and spread it yourself. You can become what you present.

UNDERSTAND EMOTION – So you want to cry, go ahead. It’s perfectly normal today that a puppy video that yesterday gave you a smile today makes you ball like a baby. Depression can be a dominating emotion but if you allow yourself to experience the variety of human emotions that can create balance and a much healthier feeling. So go ahead with your cry but balance it with an “I love you” or a deserving “thank you” and experience your humanity full of emotions without undue lingering in any.

BE PRODUCTIVE – Most of us become creatures of routine and our habits become embedded in our day. Your in box, messages and meetings may be drastically altered and you can find yourself wishing there was more despite a previous life of complaining how much there was. Of course physical exercise is always key to good health, mental and physical, but pay as much attention to a new challenge. Fit that challenge into your altered routine. Maybe you’ll come back ripped with a six pack or speaking a new language. There’s no points for logging couch time or how many bags of chips get scarfed.

Today’s environment is very worthy of a little depression, of course. When
you look in the mirror don’t get further down because you find yourself down.
True, you may have to work a little harder to be happy these days and none of
this changes the core realities we are all dealing with but there is no reward
for living in worry, expecting the worse, feeling depressed about yourself or
the world condition. Remember your first breakup? Maybe you cried and
it seemed like the end of the world at the time. Somehow you heard that time
would heal and though you probably found little comfort in that idea at the
time you’ve since experienced it so remember the lesson.

Throughout human evolution there’s been horror and happiness and rarely
is it fairly disseminated. No one can promise you your situation will have a
great outcome or even that it will be fair as serious consequences of a global
pandemic play out. What I can promise you is that those who will later thrive
are more likely the ones who didn’t let the bad overwhelm their hope, their
emotions, their positivity. So spread a little sunshine, the world’s gotten
dark enough.

©2020 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with CRISIS MANAGEMENT or other BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. Our current book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Leadership, Sales — No Comments ↓

Timing is everything it is said and whomever said it wasn’t kidding. Most of the time if I’m coaching a client through a “crisis time” they need to overcome a sales obstacles that’s usually linked to their staff, their management or a set of circumstances that may be common but is extraordinary to them. Today, we have a bizarre commonality in that we have a world in crisis that is drastically altering how, when, where and why we do business. But you want to eat, you have to sell, and so it goes for the great majority of businesses.

Feel free to disregard this if you sell sanitizing supplies, hospital gowns/masks, ventilators or toilet paper. You have other problems but demand isn’t one of them. Demand isn’t a problem for many other businesses who are suffering disruptions in supply chain. If you market goods made in China it may be months more before the spigots will open. For the majority of businesses the paradigm is less a crisis of supply and demand and more so one of sheer uncertainty with a healthy mix of fear.

Since bouncing back, but first surviving, is our inevitable goals we know that competition will still be fierce. That competition may be in finding customers to sell to but surely now is when you will sow the fruits of the relationships you have built. You can’t deposit good will in the bank though so what strategies can you employ to adapt to the crisis environment all around.

After twenty-five years in corporate life I was ready to answer for my own executive leadership and start a small-business. Long was it a dream and the timing seemed perfect as the publishing industry was imploding around me. That was twelve years ago and, being born lucky, I had just set up shop in September of 2008. It was mere weeks after my new business cards arrived that Lehman Brothers collapsed and the financial crisis sprouted into bloom. I quickly realized that selling “corporate skills” to HR Directors was an express lane to bankruptcy.

I quickly altered my path and bought a sales training franchise because it seemed to make sense that if there was anything to invest in when times were toughest it was sales, selling skills, and learning how to help companies stay above water and position themselves for the inevitable rebound in business cycles. Who knew how far we’d sink first or how long it would take to bounce back so how to sell in crisis time was an immediate and indeterminate need. Sound familiar?

A lot of what we trained on selling in a “tough” market provides great lessons for some best practices to adopt right now, here are my top 10 keys to crisis time selling:

  1. EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY AS A SHARED EXPERIENCE – Everyone has the same questions today and no one has a lock on the answers. “What do you expect?” Is a question that you should work from and don’t fear not knowing.
  2. LISTEN HARDER THAN EVER – Your prospect or client will tell you how and when they can buy so hear all their concerns and provide contingencies as you can.
  3. EMPATHY, NOT SYMPATHY, CREATES MUTUAL BONDS – You’ve got problems, your client/prospect has problems so let the shared experience bring you together to a place of trust that is the basis for a good sales relationship
  4. LOOK TO OFFSET OR SHARE RISKS IN TERMS, TIMING OR WHERE IT MATTERS – Perhaps extended payments or delayed payments will make a difference. Discover how you can make it easier to buy and roll out that idea.
  5. VISUALIZE A COMMON BELIEF IN THE FUTURE – For some it will be patriotism, confidence in America, if you can project brighter times and get agreement you can use optimism, selling through pessimism is extra hard.
  6. QUESTION WITH COMPASSION – This is the time when the better salespeople rely on their training not to be fake but to be genuine. Using Reversing technique helps boil things to the core.
  7. UNDERSTAND PAIN, FEAR OR OPPORTUNITY – One of those will be a predominant emotion and each has a path for a selling professional to travel.
  8. FIND OUT HOW CAN YOU HELP YOUR CLIENT TODAY IN EXCHANGE FOR BUSINESS TOMORROW – The idea is that if I can help you today can I count on you tomorrow…creating obligation may not hit this months number but you need to be in this for the long game.
  9. EMPHASIZE SALES BEHAVIORS – It is easy for apathy and hopelessness to overwhelm today. The reality is that whatever used to take you 10 tries to get 1 result probably now takes 20 so the most important thing is to increase, not decrease activity. Checking in on all current clients, letting prospects know you are still working and there for them and making sure working from home does not mean doing less, it needs to facilitate doing more to get near the same results.
  10. CREATE OR EXPLOIT A CULTURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY – If this is part of your current selling environment you are ahead of the game. If it’s not then what could be a better time to pull together, to follow through on commitments and to be realistic about how hard you’ll have to run just to stay in place. Whether by carrot or stick or by common need appeal share commitments, celebrate success and focus on selling efforts rather than selling results.

Putting the effort into planning and executing sales behaviors now means you can have faith that results will follow. Instant gratification, big wins and great months may not manifest for some time but when the gates are again open it will be those who did the most work when they were shut who will reap the greatest rewards. That’s a lesson from history and while these waters are uncharted the cycles of business are as inevitable as sunrise…right after this eclipse.

©2020 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with SALES TRAINING or other BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. Our current book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Blog, Personal Performance — No Comments ↓

What makes a “winner?” To inspect it let’s think of the most important questions you can ask yourself in a full intropsection checkup. The life components both large and small. What you have versus what you want. What you dream versus what you have. What you do and what you haven’t, won’t, dare not or will not do. Is your commitment a maybe or a yes, are your tasks a line of accomplishments or a list of yet to do. In the little games we play for seeking success the answers depend on how you are playing the game, what game you are playing and, who you are playing against and, what the stakes are relative to your motivation and moral compass.

Winning, one would suppose, can be a summary result for those who have a plan, fuel and a destination. They are the ones who boldly jot from accomplishment to accomplishment. They are winners. Not every win is equal, there are degrees of winning. Little games to get by or major deals that shake the bank account. The extremes of success in these games are often about playing in a very small field, or perhaps creating it. Most examples mega-success are people that had a combination of three things: Ravenous Desire, Continuous Drive and Bankable Detail.

What makes winners? They are usually the ones with a success formula combination of desire, drive and detail. Add to that they seem to attract luck, in fact they often plan on it. It is this therapist’s view that we can plot your success curve using these three dimensions of attributes. While it’s the aggregate that defines the business character it makes sense to break down the three aspects. As with any triumvirate, the balance and coordination tells the real story, your story.

DESIRE

For what do you want? How badly do you want it? Why is it so important? Is it a virtuous or a narcissistic motivation? How does this want impact, dominate or create your morality? Are you the Houston Astros or New England Patriots whose culture became dominated with a desire to win with a broad moral view of right and wrong. Is corporate spying to unlock trade secrets fair actions. Is our desire to keep up, save ourselves, prosper wildly. For winners it is the desire to win that is fundamental to their success. Few achieve top tier status by accident, most want desperately to be there, top shelf looking down. There is another key question to ask though many ignore it: Why this desire? (But that’s another therapy.)

DRIVE

Every desire is translated into actions toward an end but it is your drive where the hours and the capital; physical, mental and/or financial, will be spent. Your early failure response, trial and error, overlooking or learning from criticism or using it’s as fuel are all part and parcel to to see if desires manifest, change direction or fail. As with desire our drive can also be a boundary-pusher for the line of too far, too illegal, too overstepping. It is where the ends and means have their centuries old argument over who justifies whom. Drive starts as primal, what we need to get by but as it engage our imagination where desire resides the two combust for action.

DETAIL

And here’s where so many “2 out of 3 ain’t bad” stories are told. What would you expect when it is where the devil lives? Detail is the strategy we chart for our drive to engage toward our desire. Get it right and good builds on good, get it wrong and you may meander beyond recovery. Detail is the land of broken dreams as well as the immaculate successes. Both reside here but the broken dreams are stored in high rise towers padding the view for those whose mastery of detail landed them on top.

WINNING

By any measure this is a variable. Not everyone needs gigantic wins, one or two little wins a day can make for a rewarding life. There are those who have made winning the only desire and become addicted to where the actions stop being about anything other than winning. When that happens did you win? Did you stack the deck, do you care? The first deck was stacked moments after the first deck was invented but whether you gain from it or struggle to overcome it you can win. Do you want to, do you need to? Are you willing to do what it takes, smartly?

Accomplishment, self worth, satisfactions…among many other things are factors you can control in your professional and personal life. If the desires line up and lead to happiness then it’s a blessed life. How do you know when you get there? What if the desire was the climb and not the view? Success is a simple concept with endlessly complex variations. What is likely true is that your sense of, and actual, success are both a product of your Desire, Drive and Detail, that is what has put you where you are. More important perhaps, it is a roadmap for a new journey at any time.

©2020 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with WINNING or BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His current book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Blog, Leadership, Management — No Comments ↓

Let’s hold off figuring out how many steps and start with the primary question. Is creating an Accountability Culture a good move for your business…or your life for that matter? For a manager who wants to create better margins through efficiency we know that the results, that we can control, are either about people or processes. A business may have reams of processes and what would be a normal percentage of absolute optimum be? Accountability is a methodology as well as a culture that creates an environment where processes improve because there a connection between what needs to happen and the results.

So many of our business process failings are not because we may be missing the process, it may be incomplete or incompatible, need to be modernized or amended. A process is a fluid thing for sure but the biggest reason why processes fail is that people don’t follow them. And, by the way, a process that isn’t followed is sure to fail at worse, limp at best. So rather than address processes singularly with process improvement tactics what if you could make a more fundamental change in the people that could drive results in the processes?

MyEureka Solutions markets a 4-Step Accountability™ process to help businesses install a cultures that instills responsibility. For this we break “Accountability” into 4 steps:

Step 4 – Measurement

If we reverse engineer from accomplishment we’ll know we’ve arrived because we become comfortable measuring elements as well as outcomes, efforts as well as enterprise and we recirculate results into continuous improvement. Everyone is responsible for what they were supposed to do and a stronger force of team and or customer interest becomes the arbiter for conflict resolution or failing to meet expectations.

Step 3 – Actions/Belief

Nothing gets done, certainly nothing changes, without actions. It is, ultimately, what we do that creates our success. In opposition it is often what we don’t do that limits us although sometimes the opposites align. Not doing is the positive choice, doing the negative. Regardless they are all about action. When actions are structured into routines we call the behaviors. Managing the behaviors is critical to success and not just for one time but where it is self-managed and self-perpetuated.

Step 2 – Buy In

One step earlier we know that what we do has to do with what we have committed to. Whether that is procrastination or productivity our actions are grounded in our psychology that sparks them. There’s what we say we believe and then there’s how much we buy in. When you buy in fully there is a sincerity to your beliefs that will create consistency and longevity, a habit of productivity. You don’t debate yourself, you do. If you have a team beneath you it is their buy in that will determine whether the right actions get taken the right way, the right amount of time by the right people. If you are spreading culture you have to confirm your reports buy in. Likewise you have to hold them accountable to get their team to buy in. The more unified an organization “buys in” to a concept, accountability or otherwise, will be a predictor of improvement, or lack thereof.

Step 1 – Belief

So to start this train we realize that every dollar ever earned started as a concept in one’s mind. That concept became a belief. If this, then that. If a lot of this then a lot of that. If efficient this then even more of that. There is a difference between and idea and a belief. One is the qualifier and quantifier of the other. When our belief comes from a clear picture of an end result then we are ready to confirm our buy in, get going with actions aligned with goals, measure our improvements and take pride in responsibility. This base step shows us the promise of Accountability Culture.

Beware the Action Blockers (yours and others)

While all that action talk can have you lining up to walk the hot coals–and back! It’s an important element to understand that the sub-optimization of process, why it lacks or fails is often, as we said, because it was not followed. In other words a necessary action did not occur correctly, on time or at all. Why? We have to look for action blockers. When you know what you should do but you don’t do it. Are you avoiding something? Afraid of something, disinterested, making a point, assigning blame elsewhere…? The list can go on and on. What needs to be fixed isn’t always the process but what is keeping it’s cast of characters from the actions and behaviors necessary for success. Accountability Culture self perpetuates success and looks to continuously improve. Pretty good foundation for a business, no?

©2020 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with ACCOUNTABILITY CULTURE or BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His current book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Business Therapy — No Comments ↓

Sorry, you need therapy. Maybe you don’t have to pay for it and maybe you don’t have to talk about dreams of your mother on a couch. You may not need ice packs or hot packs, massage, aromas, stones, exercise, shopping, squeezing, zen living or running as your therapy but everyone needs something as their escape, coping experience, rehabilitation, motivation and repair.

Life, you know, work, stress, family, pressure, bills, dreams. Therapy can be self-medicating or professional, it can be formal or casual, structured or random, regular or occasional. All the options exist and the trick to finding success and happiness in tandem is to make sure therapy is applied in every part of your life.

MENTAL HEALTH

Therapy here might be taking a mental health sick day, it is surely about paying attention to your overall sense of well-being. Depression is something you can work with, for a time, everyone has at least minor episodes, but if you are not spending the majority of your life believing you are happy then you have work to do. Maybe you need your own version of a “good book,” maybe you need a friends network, a special someone or a professional’s voice for perspective but our mental faculties are our most vital so they deserve premium attention

PHYSICAL HEALTH

Having helped finance my Orthopedist’s practice for 25 years I know you have to pay attention to your body. This can be rehabilitating an injury, working out to prevent a future one, exercising to good health or burning off the stress with exertion and few drips of sweat. You might sit in Lotus, squeeze in 18, run five miles or walk one. To steal a well trademarked adage you should definitely just do it.

FINANCIAL HEALTH

Money can’t always make you happy but not having it, owing too much of it, spending whether you have it or not, ignoring tomorrow and any number or circumstances about money will strongly influence your happiness, success and freedom. If it’s not your field, maybe if it is, you should be hearing from professionals. Sure you can get it from books or YouTube, peer groups or a “guy.” Whether it’s insurance, investment, retirement or living expenses this house needs to be in order.

BUSINESS HEALTH

Our consulting to provide effective strategy, performance, accountability, sales, operations, HR areas, all now take a therapy approach that’s different than the traditional model. The reason is simple and we are happy to share the concept. Business, like mental, physical and financial health has a state of health. Maybe enough sales can provide all the strength you need but most companies are sitting on their potential. It takes a keen look into the underside of performance and motivation to understand the gap between what is and what could be. Finding your business therapy can be internal, good meetings culture, open dialogue and agendas among others.

You can get a readout from a physical of all the numbers and stats and comparisons will tell you a story but the doctor has to look into your eyes to really see the whole story. Same for your business, you may review the weekly sales, spending, accomplishing but you better make sure you keep a tab on your business health lest you find out when it becomes beyond repair.

©2020 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His recent book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Uncategorized — No Comments ↓

The Trick To Holiday Bonuses

Every business owner who gives an annual or a holiday bonus wants it to be appreciated. Give it once and employees can feel they are annually entitled. Should a bonus be seen as a gift or is it earned compensation? The first trick to having this process be both a benefit of recognition and an act of appreciation is to clearly establish what it is, how it was earned or granted. There are a few tricks employers might use to keep their generosity from being taken for granted.

Establish the Rationale

An earned bonus and a gift are not the same thing. It is not uncommon for a bigger company to have both–or for some to have neither. What employees disdain is inconsistency and unpredictability. If you were planning your holiday gift budget or a significant personal expense it is smart to understand and anticipate your compensation. Whether it is a bonus or a gift however, there should be a criteria for the giving and the amount. The factors to account, and plan for are: company P&L, actual v. goals results, group performance, individual accomplishment(s).

A bonus should have more structure than a gift as it is broadly considered to be earned while a gift is more likely bestowed with more emotion or intention. It may make more sense for an annual bonus not to be at year-end where they can be tied up in holiday spirit. If the company income goes to an owner’s personal income tax it can likely take several weeks to evaluate the final performance factors that would decide a bonus. While books can close the accounting can often lag with variables to consider. Certainly these items are better being objective, clear and laid out in advance but reality of the now or worry for the near future can get in the way.

Giving a gift, whether in holiday spirit or recognition for retention can be a little tricky. If your “gift” is actually a holiday-timed bonus with objective measures less so, but let’s stick with gifts. Current tax laws regarding gift compensation are a consideration, but like getting a pair of socks when you hoped for an iPhone, the last thing you want is disappointment in a gift. Material items once were more appreciated but having $400 eight hundred thread count bed sheets show up as income on your W2 is perilous.

As ever, cash is king when it comes to gifts as the material of choice but it pails in comparison to the human connection that may be at the source–or not. Withholding may be unavoidable but promoting you are giving a $1,000 bonus and getting a check for $624 is not getting socks, but it’s not a new iPhone either so keep the giving and the actual getting in perspective.

Here are a few tricks to making gifts have impact:

  • Deliver gifts with a human connection; a handshake, a direct thank you and eye contact. To the degree these are removed or distant expect the impact may be diminshed.
  • Think about the net. Taxes are everyone’s burden but if you want to make a connection and give an employee $1,000 then think about making the gross whatever above that so that the net is the number appreciated.
  • Cash or check? It’s not always practical to use cash but think about how you would feel getting an envelope with a pay stub and $500 bills rather than a direct deposit stub. There are certainly risk considerations to that but there’s also a “wow” factor so if your situation allows for cash it might be perceived as a very cool gift to get.
  • Explain not only the emotion around a gift and avoid platitudes, (“To the best team in the world…”) but link it to the keys that lead to success (“To the team that successfully launched brand X”). It’s okay to note the conditions of factors out of your control but don’t confuse motivation with excuses pro or con. A sense of transparency and variability of conditions improves understanding and appreciation.
  • Be consistent, to say, “It wasn’t a good year but…” and then gift, suggests that whatever the results the gift is to be expected. Along with that make emotion consistent and genuine. A $500 gift may easily be appreciate more than an $800 gift if it is presented appropriately.

Whether you are giving an earned bonus with a congratulation or a holiday bonus to be disbursed with thanks for loyalty compensation and recognition are intertwined. Having a sincere commitment as the giver and being able to express it is the best opportunity to have the receivers appreciate the intent, create loyalty and have a marked result on company culture. As in almost all employer-employee interactions the amount of success is proportionate to the quality of communication.

Happy Holidays.

©2019 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with your RECOGNITION STRATEGY or other BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow Tom @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His recent book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Blog, Personal Performance — No Comments ↓

It seems most of what we get evaluated on is what we do but as often as not the critical “x” factors in our success is what we didn’t do. Did we know what we should have or could have done to make a difference? Were we aware there was a must do that we managed not to do, or not on time? So why didn’t you do it? Shall we line up the excuses, or cut to the chase?

In over ten years of performance and strategy consulting I learned a very clear lesson that more often than not people know deep down what to do and the lacking success question to answer is why didn’t you do it. My consulting rebranded under Business Therapy precisely because figuring out why you didn’t do what you know you should was often the success formula more often than them lacking a brilliant strategy for market. As to the reasons given why: you hate doing it, you don’t care, you just don’t want to, you don’t feel you know how, you are afraid of something, your thoughts have successfully talked yourself out of it.

Much of this gets lumped into procrastination and often can be labeled an issue with time management. Sure, that can often be a root cause but what is more common is that things are not done due to a type of thought process that keeps us from doing what is ultimately in our best interest. We call this ACTION RELUCTANCE, but what does that mean?

Reluctance to take an action is primarily about one thing, FEAR. That can take several different shapes. Sales Managers have long battled with salespeople over Call Reluctance. Especially, in the days of cold calling. The fear of rejection or a lack on conviction that you are helping people or doing something that they will see as positive leads us to find reasons not to do it. The primary reasons why so much sales activity has moved to email away from the phone is the ability to feel like you are saying what is supposed to be said without the human confrontation or an immediate rebuke.

Ask a person out there in the dating game how did their last date break up happen and the two most popular responses are either by text or by ghosting. It is far easier to say and do what we want when there are guaranteed positive outcomes otherwise we delay or avoid it entirely. Likewise, read the comment trail on anything of controversy online and you will find what would rarely be spoken to a person who might respond. There is no reluctance because there is no perceived consequence.

Another way Action Reluctance comes into play is when we connect a set of negative thoughts. That may be a direct consequence, like rejection, but often it is something we have imagined or come to believe by some experience. For example, a person decides not to directly confront someone they don’t know with an introduction, and perhaps ultimately a business proposal, because they have convinced themselves they don’t want to be a nuisance. Perhaps they have categorized their action as not likely having value. Is this a case of confidence? It can be, what is confidence other than the belief in a positive outcome or lack of concern for a negative one, but it can also be something else.

Focusing on a potential negative outcome creates a sense of “why bother.” We have an instinct that has us wanting to be liked, or at the very least not wanting to be disliked. Any action that might provoke either response is successfully avoided by not doing what is to be done. “Why should I talk to that person about my business when they probably don’t care and I might be seen as a nuisance?” Good question, why should you?

Actions follow beliefs so the trick to getting so many things done that we are reluctant to do is to replace the negative thoughts with clear positive outcome possibilities or what I label Progressive Potential. The reason to stop and talk to someone you don’t know about your business is that you believe your business provides great value, an important service or would somehow show a positive result for people who buy, or consider, what you have to sell. This is as valid a thought substitution for a product salesperson as it is for a line manager dealing with staff issues or anyone facing reluctance.

What Progressive Potential teaches us comes from quantitative analysis. Sounds complex but imagine you need to have 10 conversations to get one appointment and you need 10 appointments to get one sale. Logic explains you better have 100 conversations and the faster you have them the quicker the sale. If you focus on the 99 conversations with no yield as negative it can seem overwhelming and create reluctance. Instead if you looked at every conversation as one more out of the way getting you your 100th that will yield paydirt then the faster we get to them the better. Each one becomes an important peel getting to the big banana.

Simple fact is as humans we are programmed early on to avoid the negative and pursue the positive. If you can see things you know you should have done but didn’t you owe it to your success to honestly evaluate if your inaction was due to a reluctance. If it was you might be amazed at how fast changes to positive thoughts create a plethora of actions and those positively intended actions are the best recipe for significant success.

©2019 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with your ACTION RELUCTANCE or other BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow Tom @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His recent book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

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by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Management, Personal Performance — No Comments ↓

Of course you don’t really hate having goals, but that doesn’t mean you embrace a formal process, treat SMART goals like a legal requirement or otherwise embrace writing down what you may convince yourself you already know. So the argument isn’t if goals work, if they help, if they are necessary but rather how they are attended to and what process puts them into play. Fortunately, not everyone needs or benefits by one best practice. For the naysayers and resisters we train a three step shortcut process for goals that can be the difference between imagining, “I already know what my goals are,” and a better reality, “I’ve got a better process (for me) I will use for making and accomplishing goals.”

Why do we have goals processes? For companies with multiple employees and especially with multiple levels of authority and responsibility having a goals process means formalizing alignment between the top and the bottom. More importantly when we know what we are measuring towards we can have objective direction on what behaviors need to be in place and what priority those need. A loose and informal goals process, like, “we all know what we need to be doing,” can feel like enough but it’s a pretty poor excuse not to have at least a modicum of formality.

Most guilty of being formally goalless are the self-employed. Many are highly motivated, highly focused and many are successful by the seat of their gaberdines. Their goal is “more” and, maybe “better,” and their measurement is in their bank statement. Sure this can work, but there’s an undeniable correlation between focus and success. Some can manage this in their head, maybe even communicate it effectively to subordinates but why risk leaving success on the table because something was incomplete or not as explicit as it could be. The solution, a simple process for the goals process haters.

While my first recommendation to clients is a SMART goals process with tiered cascading between levels and formal reviews of progress sometimes that just doesn’t fit. Any good coach or consultant, teacher or manager will concur that a person’s best opportunity for success is to work within their disposition rather than always fighting it. In short, you can learn the best process in the world and agree with it but if you do it without conviction, or worse, fight it, it’s likely a waste of time. Thus our “3-Step Goals Shortcut®” for businesses or professionals.

THE THREE STEPS

As you might infer after reading this I am a strong advocate for invoking the “Rule of 3” in as many instances as practical. This approach allows less bureaucracy, overhead and administration than a traditional goals approach but gives most of the fruit with less of the gardening. In basic terms for any business there are three prongs to the success formula: 1) Revenue, 2) Expense, and 3) Process. Even if you are in a professional position that is dominated by focus on one of those three your work, at some level, directly impacts or supports these three pillars. By the way, it should go without saying, but it won’t: If this isn’t important to you it probably won’t happen anyway. If accomplishing these goals won’t produce the feeling(s) you are in it for then your emotional goals may need more than a shortcut can properly provide. Assuming not, proceed:

Step 1, Making Money

It’s most easy for anyone, especially owners and top executives to obsess on the revenue line. How much should it grow? What are my opportunities, my risks? New markets, attrition, competition and the list goes on. While writing these for an analysis may be the thorough way, simply taking an annual number and writing it down gives goal #1 a pretty clear target. Maybe you want to do it break it down quarterly, monthly or otherwise but when you add the year you get a number. The government makes us close our books annually so for step one write a simple sentence about what your revenue number should be in order to declare success for your chosen strategy.

Step 2, Spending Money

Business 101 informs that revenue less expenses gives us our profit, of course the numbers might consist of many sub categories but the bottom line is that every business has to spend money to make money. The less you can spend while making the most you can make is how you get an address on easy street. Of course there are any number of times where you need to invest much in order to earn (even a little) but that’s in the detail that, remember, you don’t want to write down in an MBA-approved thesis. So, step 2 requires you write down a sentence with and about your annual expenses for the coming year.

Step 3, How You Get To The Big Bucks

Everyone who works is ensconced in process. Every process is ripe with behaviors. One of the reasons our strategy and training practice migrated towards “Business Therapy” is that as often as not people know what they could have or should have done to achieve what they really wanted but why they didn’t becomes the key to the puzzle. Process isn’t always simple and neither is behavior modification but for shortcut step #3 write down what you need to do better, or what you need to do more of, or less of. What is it, that is in your control, that you can do to make the revenue higher, the expenses more effective and the process more efficient and repeatable? Will you feel good about doing this? Do you need help: training, therapy, hiring? Whatever it is, you better look honestly at what you want the goal 1 and goal 2 numbers to be and make a commitment to getting step 3 to directly impact one or both of the other two numbers and then you have your chance to ultimately find them adding up to what you hope.

CONCLUSION

If you haven’t embraced a goals process that should be your first choice. There are myriad trainers and consultants who can help with the structure if you don’t want the burden. If you feel that’s the business equivalent of an invasive body probe and your sure you already know what you need to do then maybe give yourself a break. Implement a simpler, but perhaps equally effective shortcut to get to the heart of what you want to accomplish, what you want to spend and what is most important to do more, better or differently to make that happen and if that will make you happy.

©2019 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with your GOALS or other BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow Tom @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His recent book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

by Tom FoxPosted on Posted in Uncategorized — No Comments ↓

We get it. Used car salesmen apparently tainted the title for all probably soon after the first Model T changed hands! The objection, however, whether it’s salesman, or salesperson to be gender neutral, is an idea that is part of self-image. Not that the objection can’t have merit. Today, you can buy a used car direct from an owner or online so chances are you’ve probably never dealt with a used car salesperson. Still, there’s surely some of the same despised game in that industry even if it’s unfair to paint any industry or job with a broad brush. So why does being identified with selling bother so many people who actually do sell as part, or most, of their job?

Let’s make a bit of a distinction here. Professional sellers, who must prospect, propose and close are generally more comfortable, and even proud of what they do. Yet, even many of them have euphemisms for titles like Account Manager, or Regional Representative. Anything to avoid the dirty word. While the professionals may use other titles for prestige or ego it’s still with a wink and a nod as to what they do. Anyone knows in business, you are what you do! It’s the non-professional sellers that really resist the nomenclature. For them, it is all about an undesirable self-image.

If you are in the service industry and you sell with your job knowledge, say an Electrical Contractor, an Arborist, or an Architect, chances are good that you identify with your field of knowledge most strongly and look down on a sales designation as a degradation of what you do. Why is that? There are stereotypes that we associate with selling and few of them are favorable. The idea of the hard sell or conning people to buy something they don’t really want is pervasive. Your own bad past experience may be an influence. Service professionals have worked long and hard to get their field expertise and in their self-image their product is what they do. Is there anything wrong with that?

Of course there’s nothing wrong with saying, to yourself and others, that you are, say, an Architect. You’ve probably never answered the what do you do question with, “I sell Architecture.” Isn’t it implied that in order to be an Architect you have to have a client and in order to get a client you had to sell your service and have someone buy it? No question, but the Architect, like most service pros, only want to believe their services are bought because of their skill at doing a job, their reputation or integrity. They don’t get work just being good at convincing people to buy. Why is this an issue?

Every business owner knows that they are ultimately a salesperson for their business whether their title is President, Owner, or Master of the Universe. (Just as they also know they may be Custodian, Customer Service Rep, etc.) Their need to sell their product or service is intrinsic but subservient to their role as head honcho. On the other hand many other businesses have professionals who certainly do manage accounts, manage crews and apply their industry expertise to achieve success but the company depends on them to also be the source of new opportunities. Selling skills are critical for success there even if it’s part of the sales process and not end to end prospecting to closing to delivering.

When things go well opportunities do come to you and then you don’t have to “sell” you just “do and bill.” If your referral tree is in full blossom, if your Google Ad Words have wanting prospects in line then your role call of traditional selling behaviors and skills may be limited. Those business are as lucky as they are rare. Most businesses have to rely on selling skills out in the field to find or even convert opportunities to revenue. This needs a fundamental element of selling to be understood, people do business with those that they like and trust. Relationships are obviously the critical aspect to selling whether it is started from a cold call first impression or a years-long legacy of working together. Developing trust, great communication, honesty, integrity…these are the real skills of Sales!

It isn’t important for any business or business owner to have plaques or cards that shout “sales” in a title. What is important for every business owner or Account Manager or Estimator is understanding everyone is part of sales success because there are no accomplishments without first having a sale. Changing the vocabulary is a more than fair trade off if you can get the skills and behaviors of expert selling. Everyone who quotes a job, specs an opportunity or shakes the hand of potential direct or indirect customer should have selling skills to be great at their job and to make the company look good. Those skills are not about smiling bullshitting with a warm handshake and talking people into something they don’t want–absolutely not! What are those skills?

5 KEY SKILLS TO SELLING IN ANY JOB

  1. Know how to actively listen
  2. Learn to ask great questions
  3. Develop trust in all relationships
  4. Write contracts not RFPs but don’t prepare any proposal based on assumptions
  5. Have a plan to create, develop and nurture opportunities

Have a staff fully versed and practiced in these skills and you will have an efficient, effective and respected group of people who sell, whatever their “real” job or title.

©2019 MyEureka Solutions LLC. For help with your SELLING CULTURE or other BUSINESS THERAPY insights contact or follow Tom @TomFoxTrainer, on LinkedIn or at www.myeurekasolutions.com/thoughts. His recent book: Business Therapy: Ideas and Inspirations To Help Build Sales, Leadership, Management, and Personal Performance is available on Amazon.

Tom Fox