Are You Marketing Inside Your Company?
When comes to marketing, we usually only apply dollars towards marketing to our customers. However, there is a great benefit to allocating more resources towards marketing inside your company...to your own people.
We develop great programs to attract new customers, and to re-market or re-engage with our existing customers. This keeps them happy, connected to us and aware of the other things that we can offer.
But on the employee side, we often fail to find and keep great talent. We don’t put enough proactive energy into attracting new employees, or do enough to remarket to the existing ones to remind them how awesome our company is.
Focus on retention and engagement when marketing inside your company - and your employees can be your very best recruiting tool.
The Challenge
- What steps can you take to focus more marketing effort towards your employees, making it just as effective as the marketing for your customers?
For more on the topic, listen to this episode of The Growth Whisperers Podcast.
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
The Power of Saying “No” When You Feel Pressured to Say "Yes"
“When I claim more than what I can handle, I limit the opportunities for another person in my community.” - Jeff Shinabarger, Author, More or Less: Choosing a Lifestyle of Excessive Generosity
Feeling too busy, or pressured to try to please, can get in the way of making sound decisions. It’s part of the human condition.
Here are two personal examples:
- Someone calls to ask me for help. If I speak with them, I know I’ll want to help, even though it will take time from another commitment, or things I need to do for myself, my partner, kids or friends.
The desire to be of service when you don’t have the bandwidth can create a lot of problems.
- While shopping for a piece of furniture recently, someone strongly recommended something I thought wouldn’t look good. Even though I said three or four times that I didn’t believe it worked, they were adamant and asked me to trust them. So I said OK and ordered it. The moment it was delivered, I knew it wasn’t right for me - and my instincts were proven right. So I sold it for a fraction of what I paid for it - it was custom ordered - and was happy to see it go.
The desire and pressure to please in that moment can overrule your own good instincts.
What we all need, as one of my coaches once told me, was a strategic filter to say ‘no’ or ‘yes’ immediately. It makes it easier to say ‘no’, the first time. Otherwise, you’re in for all kinds of new problems.
We recently did a wonderful Growth Whisperers podcast about the power of saying "no" that you can check out.
The Challenge
- Determine your strategic filter/criteria for saying ‘no’ or ‘yes’.
- Sit down and make a list of all the things already in progress, that you really should say “no” to in your Work and/or your Life.
- Make a second list of new things you're thinking about doing to which you should probably say “no”.
- Consider asking your team to do the same thing.
For more about this, listen to Episode 74 of The Growth Whisperers.
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
Are You in the Big Circle?
"You can't save time. You can only spend it, but you can spend it wisely or foolishly." - Benjamin Hoff, Author, The Tao of Pooh
Think about the adage “penny wise and pound foolish”. That’s when we get so excited about chasing little costs that we forget about the big opportunities.
Brent Parent, a great CEO I've had the pleasure of working with in the US, always talks about “the big circle and the little circle” and would ask someone on his team, “Are you in the big circle or in the little circle?”.
Focus on Opportunities
Big circles are opportunity and growth. This is where you should spend 95% of your time - doing something that adds value for a customer, creates a better relationship, and/or more business. A better relationship always leads to more business.
Little circles are problems
This is where you focus 5% of your time.
Brent’s company was incredibly successful with this approach. They were able to focus on opportunities. They were obsessively focused on growth and creating customer value. Being solid and good while growing - and not distracted by the little circle of problems, or trying to be perfect on efficiency or costs.
(But cost can also be in a big circle – such as negotiating a big contract and sticking to the proper ratios of your SG&A, or even on your gross margin.)
This is about being careful that you're not spending $1000 of time to solve a $20 problem or $10,000 of time to solve a $1000 problem. There are lots of $1000 problems that shouldn't be solved.
The Challenge
- For you and your team: are you in the big circle of opportunity or stuck in little circle problems?
- Where are you spending $1,000 of organizational effort to save $100 or $500? Especially if it's a one-time deal, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
For more about this, listen to Episode 76 of The Growth Whisperers.
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
Meet Our New Lawrence & Co. Advisors
In the past 13 months we’ve doubled our team. We've added four advisors and a support team member. This makes me so excited about our ability to deepen our support of our clients around the world.
This was the first time we’ve all been together in person, instead of virtually. We worked hard on:
- A long-term strategy and execution plans for the firm, using our Four Forces of Growth
- Updating our One-page Strategic Plan
- Completing an exercise around the DISC Methodology to understand how to best work with each other
- How we can enhance the work we do for our clients over the next year
- Testing new team-building events and post-break energizer activities.
We also each left with an assignment to update our own Master Plans and top goals for Work, Self and Life in 2022.
As well, we implemented new traditions. We started a rite of passage for new team members. Since it was the first time, all of us did this! In addition, we facilitated an annual acknowledgement and an intention-setting exercise for the coming year.
So, please allow me to introduce our new team members, all of whom we met through their work for client companies:
Lance Neale who brings fresh-thinking and an incredible passion for strategic planning and innovations that create a competitive advantage for entrepreneurial companies. His multifaceted background includes different roles in diverse companies. These include CEO, chairman of the board, and award-winning education chair for YPO.
Laurie Ballantyne who dispenses great discipline infused with a great sense of fun. Laurie has extensive entrepreneurial and executive corporate experience. She is a master of ensuring the right processes are in place to create high-performing HR teams and to recruit, screen and hire A-Players in key roles.
Kurtis Osborne, AKA “Math Guy”, who has a gift for digging deep to gather and deliver the straightforward facts needed to inform strategic decisions and build and sustain financial health. We’ve had the opportunity to work with him directly and know the value he brings to entrepreneur-led, growing companies.
Brett Abram who brings incredible wisdom to large strategic decisions with a calmness that allows everyone to stay focused on what matters. He joined us last September bringing a ton of expertise in executive development, Human Resources strategy, organizational structure and compensation.
Allison Jordan who brings the rigour and discipline of a previous career in ballet - and as an A-Player in her previous role - to provide steady support to the complex requirements of our team and their clients. We’re so lucky to welcome her to the team.
Stay tuned for when we share more about our existing team members doing great work for our clients.
And, if you need any assistance on strategic planning, HR systems, strategy and hiring; or financial modelling and analysis to inform important decisions, please reach out.
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
The Genius of the &
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
I love the "&" sign!
In his book Built to Last, Jim Collins talks about the genius of the “and” over the tyranny of the “or”, and having to choose one or the other. But you don’t have to choose just one.
When I changed the name of the firm to Lawrence & Co, we really thought about that sign and its meaning for me.
Our firm’s philosophy for more than 25 years, has been about creating an exciting, enduring, amazing business in our careers, & living a great life. Too many successful high performers are not excited about their lives, so the genius of the & is to truly bring two challenging things together.
It has always had been about inclusion versus exclusion.
I thought about this at brunch recently when I saw three spectacular-looking Eggs Benedict options on the menu. It was hard to decide, but since I like to share my partner ordered one, and I the other. Such a simple strategy to get the genius of “and” versus “or”! We got to enjoy both without eating too much.
In business, we have many situations where we think we have to choose between speed and quality or cost, or between purpose and profit, or between engaging employees or expecting higher output.
That’s often limited or unsophisticated thinking. If you put the energy in, as thinking and brainstorming takes time, you can often have epiphanies of very simple solutions to bring two challenging and opposing things together.
A little more complicated than sharing Eggs Benedict, but you get the idea.
The Challenge
- Look at a decision you need to make when you're trying to choose between two variables.
- Talk to your team. Sit and brainstorm to bring your ideas together.
- Focus on a solution to how can you make it an & - a choice that includes the two variables.
For more about this, listen to Episode 75 of The Growth Whisperers.
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.
Are Your Goals as SMART as You?
“The more specific and measurable your goal, the more quickly you will be able to identify, locate, create, and implement the use of the necessary resources for its achievement.” - Charles J. Givens, author
Most executives, leaders and managers you talk to know exactly what the acronym SMART is when it relates to goals.
But most objectives or goals at a company, team or individual level are usually far from it.
I'm not talking about whether they are relevant to the company strategy - that's a completely different conversation.
It's just about the fact that many goals are like an athlete saying, “I'm going to try hard.”
Or a salesperson who says, “I'm going to sell lots” versus “I'm going to get face to face and make a presentation to 30 new prospects” or “I’m going to close and sign $5,000,000 in new business” or “I’m going to increase my conversion rate from 23% to 27%”.
Although everyone knows this conventional wisdom, it’s rare in practice.
In organizations we work with on strategic planning, we always keep a pulse on and review goals – the quarterly setting and resetting of goals - at company and team levels.
We even created a couple of tools to help us to manage that process, to make sure that you are setting SMART goals - otherwise they can easily become vague or lose their teeth.
For example, for one organization that had a particularly hard time with SMART goals, we created a grid for each of their goals. It helped them to create a habit of keeping track and for conducting a very structured evaluation.
Setting SMART Goals - Activity vs. Outcome
One of the biggest distinctions to know is the difference between activity goals and outcome goals.
- Activity goals are relevant when it’s about doing the work and trying hard.
- Outcome goals are about getting the results and succeeding. These are more challenging to figure out in many cases, and to deliver.
In almost every case, do your best to get to an outcome goal.
The ChallengE
- Look at your overall company and team goals.
- Do they meet the SMART criteria in a way that would make one of your accounting team very happy (do they have a lot of numbers in them)?
- What can you do to sharpen them?
For more about this, listen to Episode 71 of The Growth Whisperers.
Lawrence & Co’s work focuses on sustainable and enhanced growth for you and your business. Our diverse and experienced group of advisors can help your leaders and executive teams stay competitive through the use of various learning tools including workshops, webinars, executive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.
We help high-achieving leaders to have it all – a great business and a rewarding life. Contact us for simple and impactful advice. No BS. No fluff.