Successful Blog

Check your leadership with this one simple question

by

By Lindsey Tolino

Have you seen Simon Sinek’s TED talk “Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe?” If you haven’t, go watch it now. If you’re short on time, I’d rather you watch it than read the rest of this post (but if you have time – come back!).

In Simon’s talk, he eloquently articulates great leadership. He states that leadership is a choice and not a rank. He asserts that followers sacrifice for their leader because they say their leader would do it for them.

Serving should be the hallmark of every area in your business. Serving doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. In fact, we’re even more innovative and successful when we’re motivated to help others.

Great leadership is characterized by great service. And so, here’s the one simple question to check your leadership:

Who I am serving?

As a leader, every decision you make should serve others. But that doesn’t mean you should run your business into the ground because you’re sacrificing its health for the sake of those it serves. In fact, the opposite is true. Serving well means that you seek to run a healthy business so that you can sustainably serve people for the long run.

Similar to a mom who needs to take time to be healthy herself so she can better serve her children in the long run, you need to make decisions to ensure your business is healthy as well. This may mean closing your business for a week to remodel in order to better serve customers. Or it may mean closing down over the holidays to serve your employees. Or it may mean you taking a week of vacation to rest and recharge so you can better serve when you return.

Ultimately though, your leadership should be characterized by serving others. This should be evident in how you manage every aspect of your business:

  • Marketing shouldn’t be motivated by a desire to gain sales – it should be motivated by a desire to serve the customers who are looking for your products.
  • QA/QC procedures shouldn’t be motivated by a fear of being sued – they should be motivated by a desire to provide the best product possible.
  • Clean finances shouldn’t be motivated by fear of an audit or desire to get ahead – they should be motivated by a desire to have clean numbers so that the best decisions can be made to serve people well in the long-run.

These seem like small distinctions, but they are huge. They can be the difference between having a good company and having an revolutionary one.

It seems that few business leaders are motivated to serve people through every aspect of their business. You can be revolutionarily different by using your business as a tool to serve others.

Great leadership isn’t easy, but it’s simple – serve others well in every aspect of your business.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino comes alongside artisans, craftsman and people monetizing their passions to help them create healthy, structured businesses. She shares business musings and tips at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Is Your Authentic Hustle Evident on Social Media?

by

By Lindsey Tolino

We have to see it to believe it, don’t we? Maybe we want even more proof than just seeing it, but we at least need to see it.

This is so evident on social media. If people don’t see it, they don’t believe it’s happening. We may be doing a ton of work, but if we’re not sharing what is happening, people may not think we’re doing anything.

The people that you think are successful are the ones whose work you see. Subconsciously, we may know that there are plenty of other people out there doing great work, but because we don’t see it, how can we be sure?

Sure, you share your perfectly-manicured blog post or your colleague’s article, but do you share sneak peeks of what you’re working on?

Basically, you have to answer this question – can people easily tell you’re hustling through your social media alone?

If it’s not obvious that you are, you’re missing out. People won’t believe it’s happening unless they see it. They won’t have any inkling unless you’re sharing it.

In January I interviewed former Pittsburgh Steeler and current artist Baron Batch. His experience really hit me:

“It was kind of like this light bulb went off – at the time I was doing a ton of art projects and different collaborations but I just wasn’t getting credit for the amount and quality of work that it deserved. And it hit me – no one knows. No one knows. I’m not showing anything. That opened my eyes – you have to promote yourself while you work. To show your progression.”

And this isn’t about self-promotion. This is about sharing value. It’s about allowing people to see you and your business in an honest and authentic way.

If we filter our social media presence to simply the perfected pieces, people will only see the outcome, not the process. When you showcase only the outcome, people may value it, but they will not easily identify with you. The reality is that we all struggle, working hard on challenges every day. If you don’t show the struggle, if you show only the perfect, it’s harder to identify with you.

The tweets and posts that I have greatly valued are the authentic ones.

The irony of me writing this is that I’m totally hypocritical in this area. I fix myself on the work to be done and neglect to share the process with others. I struggle with it because I want to be fully present in my work instead of thinking about how I’ll share it on social media. But I’m missing out on serving others by being authentic. I need to integrate sharing into my process, instead of treating it as an afterthought.

Can we do this together? Can we be more authentic? Can we share the process?

What tips do you have for integrating sharing into your process instead of treating it as an afterthought?

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino comes alongside artisans, craftsman and people monetizing their passions to help them create healthy, structured businesses. She writes business musings and tips at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

How To Use Yelp Reviews To Improve Your Business

by

By Lindsey Tolino

Yelp reviews can be excellent marketing or the bane of your business. Have you thought about improving your business based on reviews? Is it sometimes hard to know what is constructive criticism and what isn’t?

Here’s how to cut through Yelp reviews to improve your business:

Things to keep in mind – 1. Yelp reviews may or may not represent your customers as a whole since only a fraction of your customers “yelp.” 2. If you don’t have enough reviews, Yelp explains how to get more genuine reviews here.

 

If you have mixed reviews (3-4 star average):

  • Look for major themes. What do people generally like and dislike about your business? For example, do people often write that the table service is rude? Do people regularly write that you have the best steak tacos?
  • When you find the themes, it should show what your business is doing well and what it may need to improve on.
  • When you know what your business is doing well, ensure that you’re communicating to your customers what you do well to create accurate expectations. For example, if people love your steak tacos, your ads could say ‘Best steak tacos in town!’
  • When you know your weakness, decide if you should eliminate it, turn it into a strength or improve upon it. Let’s look at rude table service as an example. To eliminate it, you could get rid of table service altogether and convert to counter service and take-out only. To turn it into a strength, you could emphasize your rude service and use it as an edge like some restaurants have. To improve it, you could work with your servers to ensure they are serving customers more kindly.

If you haven’t been able to find major themes, issues may be related to inconsistencies in products or services. In that case, you may want to look into establishing some QA/QC processes to establish consistency.

If you have mostly positive reviews (5 star average):

Congratulations! But that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from your reviews. You can always learn and improve, especially if you’re trying to grow your business.

  • Use reviews to gain demographic info. Examining Yelp reviewers as your only demographic can be a bit misleading (because not everyone ‘yelps’), but it still helps to aggregate some data from Yelp to see who loves your business.
  • You can use this information as a source of data to help you determine areas of potential business growth. For example, if college students seem to love your place, you may want to consider events, marketing or even new locations that serve them better.

If you have mostly negative reviews (1-2 star average):

I’m sorry, this can be rough. But you have to set the emotion aside for a moment to look at it intellectually. You have direct-from-the-customer information about how to improve your business, which is great news.

  • If you have consistently negative reviews, it probably relates to the fact that you’re not delivering on customer expectations. Go back to the drawing board and examine what expectations you’re creating for customers. If you don’t know what expectations you’re creating, examine the negative reviews and cite the themes of customer disappointment.
  • If customers expected something wrongly (i.e. you didn’t mean to promise it), then you need to implement better methods of communication (in signage, advertisements, website, etc.). This will ensure that customers have expectations consistent with what you’re promising.
  • If customers expected something rightly (i.e. you do promise it), but are disappointed, then you need to examine what is letting them down specifically. If it is related to a product, use the reviews to recognize product issues and make it right. If it is related to timely service, examine your systems and determine bottlenecks. If it is related to quality service, examine your capability, culture and employees. Make changes as needed.
  • After you’ve made changes, it is essential to let customers know that you have heard their feedback and changed accordingly. You might need to run a promotion, do a PR release or even rebrand. Ultimately, you want to ensure customers know that the old problems are resolved and that you will serve them better.

Yelp is a great source of information for analyzing and improving your business. Don’t be discouraged by harsh reviews. Instead, discern through them and use information wisely to greatly benefit your business.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is small business management consultant that comes alongside artisans, craftsman and people monetizing their passions to help them create healthy, structured businesses. She writes business musings and tips at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Manage better by knowing the “why” behind your favorites

by

By Lindsey Tolino

Have you heard you shouldn’t play favorites with your employees? Do you try to be fair, but try as you might, there are still some employees you can’t help but favor?

‘Playing favorites’ has always been condemned as poor conduct. I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t play favorites. I’m more interested in why your favorites are your favorites and how that can help you manage your business.

We are logical beings and even if it’s not immediately evident why someone is your favorite, on some level you have a reason for it. It’s important to get down to why someone is your favorite because the more you know why, the better you can manage your business.

Let’s look at an example

Say you have three employees – Bob, Julie and Sam. Bob and Julie are your favorites. Sam isn’t. When you think about it, you discover Bob is your favorite because he is fun to be around, easy-going and is always smiling. You realize Julie is your favorite because she does a significant amount of excellent work to keep the business going. You’ve remarked before that you wish you had ‘three more just like her.’

But Sam isn’t your favorite. You realize it’s because Sam is always cautious, weighing pros and cons and discussing the difficult practical steps that your vision will require. This rubs you the wrong way because you feel like Sam is always trying to shut down your dreams. But when you think about it further, you realize that some of Sam’s cautious actions, like getting that extra insurance, have protected your company from what could have been a disaster.

The way to crack the code

In this example, you can see the value of examining why your favorites are your favorites. When you discover the “why” behind your favorites, you may recognize the value that some employees offer that you hadn’t noticed before. This may cause you to respect their opinion and value their contributions, which is far better than just going with how you felt about them previously.

It’s easy to say ‘don’t play favorites.’ It’s much harder to actually not do it. The way to crack the code and actually not play favorites is to dig down into why certain people are (and aren’t) your favorites. When you discover the “why”, you may not have to worry about ‘playing’ favorites because you value everyone for their unique contributions.

The dark side

Let’s go back to the example and talk more about Bob. Bob is fun to be around, so you don’t want to lose him as an employee. But when you really think about it, you realize that Bob hasn’t really done his job. Furthermore, the work he does do isn’t that good. You’ve justified keeping him on payroll because he’s good for morale. After examining why he was your favorite, you realize that he may not be the best fit for your business.

Digging into why your favorites are your favorites may not always come up roses. You may realize that you need to make changes and that can be hard. But examining the ‘why’ will lead you to discover what is best for your business. I recently watched this video where Barbara Corcoran explained how firing the bottom 25% of her sales staff was best for the business and actually what was best for them. Just because it may lead to hard decisions doesn’t mean you should abandon digging into the “why.”

Dig in, it’s best

Your business runs on your management. If you know why your favorites are your favorites, it will enable you to better manage your business. Dig in to your ‘why’ today and change your management accordingly. It’s what’s best for your business.

Author’s Bio:Lindsey Tolino is small business management consultant that uses her intentional creativity to make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Sales – The Best Way To Do It

by

By Lindsey Tolino

Sales gets a bad rap. It’s kind of earned it.

We’ve all experienced pushy sales people – ones who didn’t listen, ones who weren’t trying to serve you, ones who were trying to pushing you to buy so they’d get their commission.

No solicitors allowed

It’s off-putting to say the least.

We’ve gotten sales really backward. It shouldn’t be a pushy job. It shouldn’t be dominated by sales people’s self-interest.

Sales should actually be quite the opposite: Sales should be a position of servanthood.

Yes, you may be responsible to make certain quotas. But your job isn’t to sell indiscriminately to hit quotas. Your job is to serve people.

Your job is to serve people by finding those who need your product, serve them by informing them about your product, serve them by respecting their decision to buy or not buy your product, and serve them being a resource after they decide to buy or not buy your product.

Things get all messed up in sales when you put your interests first. Potential customers can tell if you’re selling just to make money. It’s incredibly unattractive. Not only that, you create way more work for yourself than you need to.

You know it’s better to have solid, consistent relationships with your customers than to be scrambling to find new prospects because you’ve treated past customers transactionally.

Yet, we tend toward transaction. Why? Why would we sell ourselves short of a solid relationship for a quick, one-time transaction?

It’s ultimately not because we’re selfish. It’s ultimately because we’re fearful. We don’t trust the process. We fear that we may not have enough for ourselves. So we go out and try to make a quick sale to take care of ourselves, instead of trying to serve others. Our scarcity mindset pushes us toward putting our own interests above others’.

Let me explain. If you put a small pile of food in a field and release a bunch of dogs that haven’t eaten in a week, there’s likely going to be fighting over the food.

But, if I take away the food bowl from my pit bull while she’s eating, she won’t become aggressive or fight me. She’s still interested in it. She wants it back. But she trusts me. She’s fed twice a day without fail. She knows I’ll give her food, even if I have to take it back for a moment because I forgot to put her medicine in it.

The first set of dogs have been conditioned into a scarcity mindset. My dog hasn’t. The great news is, we’re not dogs. We may have been conditioned into a scarcity mindset, but we can refuse to keep that mindset any longer.

We know that serving people is better for them and better for us in the long run. We can choose to sell to people out of a desire to serve them excellently and not out of our own self-interests. When we choose that, we create more sustainable relationships with the people we serve, which benefits us as well.

Refuse a scarcity mindset. Sell out of a desire to serve others. It’s better for all of us.

Author’s Bio:Lindsey Tolino is small business management consultant that uses her intentional creativity to make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.

Image info: Royalty-free image by Mark Brannan. (http://www.freeimages.com/photo/622720)

How To Keep Your People Engaged When Making Changes

by

By Lindsey Tolino

When I was in middle school, my best friend moved to another school district. She came to me and explained that she was moving. She said she couldn’t do anything about it and would miss me. I was sad and didn’t like it, but part of me understood because she came to me and explained the situation.

hand writing on chalkboard

Sometimes you have to change things in your business. It can be scary because you don’t want to lose loyal customers or disgruntle employees. Your customers and employees have grown to expect your business to run a certain way and you may fear changing it.

I would have been very disillusioned if I showed up to school one day and my best friend was gone because she moved. I would have been hurt because I thought our relationship meant more to her than that. I would have been angry that she didn’t care or respect me enough to tell me ahead of time.

As humans, we may feel disrespected, disillusioned and angry if someone changes something that we’ve grown to expect, without telling us ahead of time or explaining why.

This is essential to remember when making changes in your business. You don’t want to disgruntle your employees or isolate your customers by executing decisions without communicating with them. Your employees and customers hopefully feel a sense of ownership in the business. If you simply change something without communicating with them, they may become annoyed, frustrated and less invested.

Change is difficult for most people. If you talk about it ahead of time, it gives people time to process and prepare for it. Furthermore, if you discuss the reasons for the change, people are likely to be more understanding, even if they don’t like the change itself.

I grew fond of a counter-service restaurant over the past year. Without warning or explanation, many menu items increased in price by at least a quarter. The restaurant had become wildly popular, so it didn’t seem like the price increase was necessitated because of low sales. As a customer, I felt like they were trying to squeeze every last cent out of me. This may not have been true. But since they didn’t explain the increase, it seemed like it came out of greed.

If the business had simply explained the reason for the increase, my loyalty may have been strengthened rather than shaken.

Unfortunately, even if you let people know your reasons ahead of time, the changes may still isolate customers or upset employees. But discussing it will minimize the discomfort and create a smoother transition. Maybe some of them have even been hoping for the changes you’re making.

If you have changes coming, discuss it with your team and make sure they know the reasons. Talk to your customers. Let them know it’s coming and why.

It shows you respect and care for them. If you share your reasoning, it may even deepen their trust in you.

Don’t drop changes on people. Show them how much you care by discussing it with them ahead of time.

Author’s Bio: Lindsey Tolino is an intentional creative who helps make businesses better. She serves business owners with her words at ToBusinessOwners.com. Follow her on Twitter @LindseyTolino or connect with her on Google+.
Image info: Royalty-free image by Death To the Stock Photo. (deathtothestockphoto.com)