Leadership Archives – Page 13 of 14

26 Oct 2009

The Ideal Partnership

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:21:46-06:00October 26th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership|

Recently Sunwapta Solutions has been actively partnering with a number of companies to extend our product and service offering in complementary ways.

What would an ideal partnership look like (top ten list)?

Our partner would bring us lots of profitable business,
Our partner would put our needs above their own,
Our partner would pay us for the privilege of being a partner,
Our partner would be required to get their employees certified on all of our products at their expense,
Our partner would get to put our logo on their website and in return we would add them to a list on […]

20 Oct 2009

Your Marketing Company

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:21:50-06:00October 20th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Sales|

Do you think of marketing as a function within your organization? Is it something to do with communicating your message to your customers to generate leads or awareness? Part of the sales process?

In today's world marketing is everything.

Michael Gerber (E-Myth Manager) hit it on the head when he defined marketing as "the promise you make to your customers and your company's ability to deliver on that promise".

This definition says marketing is the responsibility of your entire company. Not in a superficial manner like "we are all selling our product" or "everyone has an impact on our customers"; […]

12 Oct 2009

Automating Success (Measurement)

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-06T12:40:12-06:00October 12th, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Technology|

My last post (Measuring Success) was on measuring key factors before and after a change to determine if the change had the desired effect.

Just as important, if you want to be sure that measurement is easy and will not get put aside when things are busy; you need to automate the process of generating the measurements.

This follows the agile principle of automation for anything that gets done more than once. It is equally effective for businesses.

If you have managers or staff members whose job description includes manually generating part of all of a report or key performance indicator, you have […]

7 Oct 2009

Measuring Success

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:22:19-06:00October 7th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership|

To succeed in business, common thinking says you need a vision of where you want to go, then you need a strategy (plan) for getting there, and then you need to take action over the short-term (goals, projects, tactics).

One part missing from this is measurement.

If you make a change to improve on the execution of your strategy, how do you know it has the right impact?

Gut feel or intuition? Anecdotal evidence? Or do you measure the key factors before and after?

For small to mid-size businesses, who often don't have access to a host of expert analysts, this is a difficult […]

3 Oct 2009

Knowledge Is Power

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:22:34-06:00October 3rd, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership, Technology|

Knowledge is power if you can use it to make better business decisions. The trick is to get the right knowledge in front of the right people at the right time.

Inside a business there are normally three key sources of knowledge:

Data,
Information or Document Repositories, and
People.

Chances are you have a lot invested already in each of these islands of knowledge… but they may not be connected or otherwise delivering the value you want. If the data does not already exist in a usable format, you may need to capture it.

Relying on Bob

Too many small businesses have critical functions that only one person has […]

15 Sep 2009

Strategy and Corporate Governance for Small Business

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-06T12:43:02-06:00September 15th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership|Tags: business, corporate, doug, execution, goals, governance, planning, solutions, strategy, sunwapta, wagner|

Corporate structure goes something like this:

Shareholders – The owners of the business or enterprise
Board of Directors – The elected representatives of the shareholders whose function is twofold: provide strategic guidance to the corporate officers (management team) and make sure the interests of the shareholders are protected.
Corporate Officer or Management Team – The senior person (and sometimes some of the key subordinates) are be appointed (approved or hired) by the board of directors to carry out the will of the Board of Directors and Shareholders.
Other employees and contractors – Are hired by the management team or their representatives […]

1 Sep 2009

Gaining Competitive Advantage

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:24:29-06:00September 1st, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Sales|

Today I was thinking of what competitive advantage really means and came up with a few categories or methods of gaining competitive advantage. I think it is well worth looking at how you stack up against each category periodically (anything missing?).

Capability

Essentially you have something or can do something that is significantly better than your competitors. Even better if you are the only one or there is a barrier to entry.

Speed

How quick can you deliver on your promise and how fast can you respond to change.

Knowledge

What do you know that your competition doesn't. Knowing your customer fits here and so does intellectual property.

Location

Location, […]

19 Aug 2009

Those Pesky Customers

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:05-06:00August 19th, 2009|Categories: Business Strategy, Doug's Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Mindset and Motivation, Sales|

Ever have one of those days where customers (internal or external) keep derailing something you want to get done?

If only they would go away, life would be simpler and you could accomplish all your projects.

Yup, no customers would be perfect.

No customers, no distractions… no revenue… no business.

POP!

The trick is not in making your customers go away. Unless you have no intention of growing you actually want more happy, satisfied customers receiving something they need. Your business depends on it.

So the trick, is setting up your business so you can do both; and I don't mean working 16 hours a day.

You need to […]

14 Aug 2009

A Failure to Communicate

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:25:27-06:00August 14th, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Software Development|

Ever play that game where you take a secret statement, pass it on through a subsequent chain of people. The person at the end says the statement out loud and everyone laughs at how it different it is from what it started out as.

Now add in not just memory of what was said, but include an understanding of what was said, especially if the problem is complex.

The meaning and details are both important and if either aspect is lost, good communications have not happened.

This means that in any development project where there is more than one person involved, there is […]

23 Jul 2009

Marketing Budget 101

By Doug Wagner|2017-04-03T12:26:10-06:00July 23rd, 2009|Categories: Doug's Blog, Leadership, Marketing, Sales|

Now that you know how much you are willing to spend on acquiring a new customer the next part is easy… and very hard.

How many new customers do you want?

Infinity is a good long-term goal for the highly competitive but lets bound the question a bit.

How many new customers can you handle over the next year?

Consider your ability to:

Service or supply your customers,
Your ability to grow your capacity including capital costs and time to do so, and
How big you really want to be and other factors.

Don't forget to include any customers you might lose over time in the equation.

Now […]