Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 134-136

136 122 Minutes a Month Is All It Takes

Once the systems described in this book are in place, all it will take 122 minutes of your time each month to monitor the results of your company's activity and give you a better understanding of your successes and/or failures.

The Budget and Profit and Loss Statements 20 minutes

The Accounts Receivables 30 minutes

The Financial Statements 20 minutes

Cash 52 minutes (4 minutes a day, 3 days a week)

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 192-193

193 I often advise businesspeople (and businesses) to describe how they are special in 25 words or less--what makes them stand out from the "me too" herd. If they can't do that, they ought to pack it up.

Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 13-14

15 By prolonging your sales cycle through vending, you sacrifice the contribution your own sale force can make to your profits.

Applying a technology to add value to a customer business is a 180-degree different strategy from adding value to the technology. When you claim that your technology can be an enabler of improved customer profitability, you take on two now responsibilities. First, you must know the customer business well enough to know how to enable it. Second, you must know how much of a contribution you can make to its current values and how soon you can make it.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 205-208

208...the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 132-134

134 Our society and businesses have become so complex that the process of education must continue.

We'll spend 12 to 14 hours a day running our business yet we'll spend so little time learning the skills necessary for success.

Here are some suggestions for successful training

• Prepare the learner. Let them know this new knowledge will be a value to themselves and the company.
• Present the task. Make certain your explanations are clear and concise.
• Practice the job. Allow the employees to learn by setting aside time to practice. Their other work may be delayed while they are learning their new assignment. Be patient.
• Make certain the trainee is taking adequate notes.
• Have the right attitude. Create an atmosphere where fear and intimidation are not present. All people to make mistakes.
• Provide additional training. Use formal educational courses at all levels of your company. Attend trade association meetings and learn from your competitors.
• Always remember, new ideas generate new profits.
• Be patient.

Highly educated and responsible employees are your most important asset.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 188-192

189 Saturn practices unprecedented relationship marketing.

191 Immigrants are one of America's best-kept secrets. Their intense drive to succeed and willingness to work tirelessly is an inspiration to all of us who've been around a few generations and gotten a little too used to the good times.

192 Indonesia is the world's fourth most populous country.

Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 13-14

14 Because of the time value of money, each dollar they can obtain from working with you is worth more to them today than it will be worth tomorrow.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 204-205

205 Indeed, the point of this entire book is not that we should "add" these findings to what we are already doing and make ourselves even more overworked. No, the point is to realize that much of what we're doing is at best a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 131-132

132 WE MUST DELEGATE AND TRAIN

The primary purpose of delegating is to allow owner-managers sufficient time to mange their company. Your time needs to be spent controlling company expenses, monitoring the key financial elements of the company, learning to understand what the company's financial statements mean, and planning for the future. Delegation is also the key element in the development and training of responsible employees.

The owner-managers of small companies tend not to delegate for several reasons.

• Incompetent staff
• The glory of manual labor
• I can do it better myself

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 185-188

188 Entrenched firms almost invariably respond the wrong way to innovative competitors.

It works like this: A mature, slumbering industry (e.g., gas lighting) is attracted by a wild outsider (e.g., electric lighting) The Rip Van Winkles awake, shrug their immense shoulders and get down to work. Soon productivity in gas lighting is surging (this actually happened) and the pipsqueak upstarts are on the run (man fold). The battle is won but the war is already lost. In a few years the upstarts iron the kinks out of their early, awkward technology and yesterday's resurgent champs, having doggedly stuck to their guns, will be overrun. The story is mostly hopeless. (For the individual oldster firm, at any rate.) New technology incubators--skunk works, distant start up divisions, hefty blue-sky R&D expenditures, alliances with innovative outsiders, etc. --seldom tip the scales for them. They generally fail (until it's too late) to alter the mind-set of the entrenched "culture" of marketing, technology, finance, whatever.

Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 10-13

13 By equipping its customer's sales force with their own cost-benefit analyses and training them to sell consultatively, suppliers like Honeywell can help create cash flow that they would never otherwise be able to effect and can partner with their OEMs in sharing the benefits.

 

...suppliers who are low on a value chain can extend their reach to end users to whom the value added to highest and whose gains are greatest.

 

Consultative Selling makes time the customer's enemy. Delay works against the customer because it increases the opportunity cost of not improving profits day by day, weeks by week, and month by month. The longer the customer delays, the greater the cost. Once a revenue improvement or cost reduction is available, the customer must begin to flow it into operations or it is lost, either in whole or in part.

 

The internal pressures to improve profits provides customers with a strong incentive to close proposals.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 195-204

204 Boeing's BHAG, while huge and daunting, was not any random goal. It was a goal that made sense within the context of the 3 circles.

 

The Boeing case underscores a key point: To remain great over time requires, on the one hand, staying squarely withing the 3 circles while, on the other hand, being willing to change the specific manifestation of what's inside the 3 circles at any given moment. Boeing in 1952 never left the three circles or abandoned its core ideology, but it created an exciting new BHAG and adjusted its Hedgehog Concept to included commercial aircraft.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 125-131

132 WE MUST DELEGATE AND TRAIN

The primary purpose of delegating is to allow owner-managers sufficient time to mange their company. Your time needs to be spent controlling company expenses, monitoring the key financial elements of the company, learning to understand what the company's financial statements mean, and planning for the future. Delegation is also the key element in the development and training of responsible employees.

 

The owner-managers of small companies tend not to delegate for several reasons.

• Incompetent staff
• The glory of manual labor
• I can do it better myself

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 182-185

185...chance determines success, and there's only one way to beat the odds: Lots of statistically independent tries unconstrained by "the way we do things around here"

 

Natural selection...draws forth a complex set of molecular responses that may superficially look like...a Master Molecular Biologist tinkering with the genes; but, in fact, all that happening is mutation...interacting with a changing external environment.

 

 Amos Tuck School of Business professor Richard D'Aveni...coined the term hypercompetition, claiming that today's outrageous pace of change calls for upside-down business approaches. "The new code of conduct is an active strategy of disrupting the status quo to create an unsustainable series of competitive advantages. (That's right, unsustainable--i.e., hunting for and quickly exploiting competitive edges, then abandoning them before the competition responds.

 

"It is rather an age of cunning, speed, and surprise. It may be hard for some to hang up the chain mail of sustainable advantage after...so many battles.

 

Disruption...offers a vision for disruption, competences for disruption, tactics for disruption.

 

"Purposeful misfit is the point! He even gives us a new 7S paradigm, including surprise, shifting rules of competition, and strategic soothsaying (looking for information in highly unconventional ways--perhaps Nancy Reagan's astrologer?)

Consultative Selling/Mac Hanan 9-10

10 Profitless investments are the equivalents of scrap. Both take customer funds out of circulation, whereas investments in rapidly turning-over profit making proposals replenish funds, instill motivation to gainfully employ them, and assure consultative sellers of a perpetually prospective customer base.

 

APPLYING THE CONSULTATIVE SELLING PROCESS

1. It starts with a value database on the values you normally add to customer operations. Your normal values-added--your "norms" are derived from the value database.

2. By comparing customer revenues and cost against your norms, a lead database is automatically created. A lead opportunity exists wherever your norms offer a competitive advantage over a customer's current performance.

3. Proposal leads flow into closable proposals. The outcomes from each closed proposal are fed back into the value database to fertilize your norms.

4. The process culminates with a partnered penetration plan that locks in your consultative partnership and locks our competition.

 

For many suppliers, such as manufactures of components and subsystems to original equipment manufactures (OEMs) Consultative Selling is their saving grace.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 194-195

195 Enduring great companies preserve their core values and purpose while their business strategies and operating practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. This is the magical combination of "pre-serve the core and stimulate progress."