Great managers are hard to find. Great managers have a true gift and a passion for getting the most out of people. Great managers possess a unique ability that is not in everyone.

This message is a mini–passionate plea. Having worked with so many managers, I now see clearly the ones that truly want to be great managers and the ones that are doing it for other reasons (e.g., ego, advancement, having nowhere else to go).

One of my clients a few years back—the owner of the business—took over the sales manager role for his company because he thought it would be fun. He was very upset with me when I challenged his motivation and long-term ability to be a great, consistent, and enduring manager of his salespeople. Many years later, as he sits in the visionary seat of his fast-growing company with a great manager in the Sales VP seat, he thanks me for the brutal honesty and admits his ulterior motive.

A person who says “other than having to discipline people, keep expectations clear, repeat myself often, run meetings, and hire, fire, review and hold people accountable, I like being a manager” is not a great manager, and something bad is going to happen. Not always maliciously or purposely, but it’s going to happen.

If you’re sitting in a management seat for the wrong reasons or have put a manager in a seat who doesn’t belong there, you owe it to those people being managed to make a change. Make sure that every seat in your accountability chart that requires a manager is filled with a person who gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to be a great manager. If not, you must make the change.

Find out how you’re doing; (click here) to download the Management Questionnaire which is part of the LMA download. It contains five simple self-assessment points that get to the root of what makes great managers.

“Other Than Managing People, I Love Being a Manager” is a post from: EOS Worldwide

A little more than a year ago, Brogan & Partners began implementing a new program focused on changing the company for the better called the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

The downtown Birmingham-based company’s leadership says it has allowed the Internet advertising firm to clearly define its direction, management team and better focus on its goals. That has allowed it to grow its bottom line and adapt the shifts in its rapidly changing industry.

“We have gotten more done in the last year than we did in the last five years,” says Ellyn Davidson, managing partner of Brogan & Partners.

Brogan & Partners focuses on advertising on the Internet, social media and mobile mediums. the 27-year-old company works on brand engagement and has a knack for marketing toward women. It has hired five new people over the last year, including a senior art director, a senior media director, an account manager and a social media expert. It now employs 30 people and two interns.

The company has also focused on the social media aspect of its business. It has worked to educate its senior staff about the ins and out of Web 2.0 while helping the social media-savvy younger workers become more intimate with traditional marketing tactics.

“We have spent a lot of time and training to bring our staff up to speed on social media,” Davidson says.

Source: Ellyn Davidson, managing partner of Brogan & Partners

http://www.metromodemedia.com/innovationnews/BroganandPartners0254.aspx

Brogan & Partners expands staff by 5 in downtown Birmingham is a post from: EOS Worldwide

When 100% of our time is given to doing the business (marketing, selling, making, fixing, shipping, accounting, etc.), we’re stuck.  We’re in a rut that leads to failure.

It’s a common trap we can all fall into.  We have something the market wants.  Demand increases and the technical activity associated with getting and filling orders completely fills our schedules.  Forty hours per week becomes fifty and then sixty.  We start taking work home (it’s a sign when what we once enjoyed becomes work).  Everything becomes more mechanical.  We lose balance often at the same time our business is losing steam. 

When we’re in the rut, the solution appears to be counter-intuitive and impossible to execute, but we must allocate a portion of our time to work on the business if we want our business to survive.  It’s not optional – it’s essential.  We need to continually infuse creativity into our business, if we want to stay out of the rut.  That won’t happen if we don’t:  1) purposefully allocate time for it and 2) utilize an agenda that maximizes the creative input in the time allocated.

The best solution I’ve seen to infuse the most creativity in the shortest amount of time is the EOS® Meeting Pulse™.   It calls for setting aside 5 days per year with your executive leadership team and 90 minutes or less per week (5% to 6% of your total work hours), using specific agendas to extract creative input to prioritize, solve your issues, maintain focus and advance your company.  

If you haven’t already established the discipline, start today and stay out of the rut. 

The Rut is a post from: EOS Worldwide

Company mission statements result in a more successful organization, according to EOS Worldwide®. The creators of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®), recently reported that companies who have well-developed mission statements that accurately describe the purpose of the business tend to be more successful and stay in business longer than those who don’t. According to Gino Wickman, EOS Founder, “Defining a company mission statement, or as we call it, a Core Focus™, isn’t always an easy process, but it’s an extremely valuable exercise that helps business owners fully clarify their purpose for the business and gives everyone a central purpose to focus on. A great mission statement also makes it easy for other organizations to gain insight into what you do.”

Company Mission Statements Key to Success Reports EOS Worldwide® is a post from: EOS Worldwide

The White House honors local leaders for their work as mentors to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

Champions of Change: Entrepreneurship Mentors is a post from: EOS Worldwide

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The Bush Institute has, under the leadership of Amity Shlaes, launched what it calls the 4% Project: a massive intellectual and research effort aimed at better understanding economic growth and, ambitiously, pushing the American economy toward four percent annual GDP…
Growthology

Aiming for Four Percent Growth is a post from: EOS Worldwide

Boxing club back in business at Pine Point
The newest boxing club already has drawn good interest from the community's youth and that's exactly what coach Albert Basswood and assistant coach Mike Swan wanted. “It's something for the teenagers to do and more are getting interested in boxing,” …
Read more on DL-Online

Expense Reduction Coaching(R) Celebrates National Small Business Week by …
Business owners know all too well that business growth often goes hand-in-hand with a growth in operating expenses. As National Small Business Week approaches (May 21st), Brian Miller, president and COO of Expense Reduction Coaching(R) (ERC), …
Read more on MarketWatch (press release)

Boxing club back in business at Pine Point is a post from: EOS Worldwide

Small business owners have been complaining that poor sales are their No. 1 problem^[1] (PDF) since the early days of the Great Recession. And business advocacy groups on the left^[2] (PDF) and the right^[3] have been pushing Washington to help. How urgent are pleas for reduced regulation^[4] (PDF), better access to capital^[5] (PDF), tax cuts^[6] (PDF), and the like? Are sales really that bad?

At first glance, the data suggest that small business owners should stop griping. The new monthly Intuit (INTU^[7]) Small Business Revenue index, which is based on data from 200,000 small companies that use QuickBooks Online software for financial record keeping, reveals that average revenues are up 9.5 percent since the recovery began. (For purposes of the index^[8], Intuit defines any QuickBooks user as a small business.)

Moreover, the pace of sales growth from the recovery’s inception until February 2011 was actually higher than the pace of revenue growth in the year and a half preceding the recession. (The annual rate of growth was 4.6 percent, vs. 4.2 percent.)

Whether small business sales are weak or not is more than an academic question. The Republican leadership has made helping struggling entrepreneurs a central part of this year’s presidential campaign. Claiming that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough, they recently pushed a $ 46 billion small business tax cut through the House.

The bill, which offers income tax deductions of up to 20 percent to companies with fewer than 500 workers, is not expected^[9] to make it through the Democratic-controlled Senate. Failure in the Senate will allow the Republicans to claim that the Democrats aren’t doing enough to help small business owners in their time of need.

Last week, I pointed out that many people perceive small business job growth as weak^[10] because small employers aren’t adding jobs fast enough to quickly reverse the negative effects of a deep downturn, even if they are adding jobs faster than big businesses. The sales data show a similar pattern.  While the numbers are positive, they’re not strong enough to reverse the hit that small companies took during the Great Recession, and are now weakening.

A closer look at the Intuit data reveals the depth of small business owners’ sales problem and supports demands for help. Despite significant growth during the recovery, the data reveal that small business sales still haven’t completely recovered from their 9.7 percent drop during the downturn. Four and a half years after the Great Recession began, they’re currently 1.1 percent below where they were before the economy went south.

That figure might understate the slow revival. Just to have kept up with inflation, small business sales would need to be 11.1 percent higher now than in December 2007. And they’re no longer growing as rapidly as they were at the beginning of the recovery. Intuit’s index shows that since February 2011, sales growth has slowed to a rate of only 1.6 percent per year, compared to 11.2 percent in the year and a half before the housing bubble burst.

The recent Republican tax bill might be the wrong answer to the problem of poor small business sales. As Howard Gleckman, who blogs for the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, explains in a recent post^[11], the temporary tax cut won’t do much to change fundamentals. It will provide little more than a windfall for eligible companies.

However, the Republican Party’s desire to respond to complaints about poor sales makes sense. Small business sales remain well below pre-recession levels in inflation-adjusted terms, and are currently growing at an anemic pace. Policy makers might not be able to get them back to housing bubble-juiced levels, nor should we necessarily want them to. But they have to pay attention to the numbers.  Helping small business is a more effective strategy than tempering expectations.

BusinessWeek.com — Small Business

Slowing Sales Show Small Business Needs Help is a post from: EOS Worldwide

Innovators Forum features Michael Gerber as he outlines the four different mind-sets of the entrepreneur, and gives a synopsis of the E-Myth concept. Read the blog at www.CiscoInnovators.com

Michael Gerber: The Four Mind-Sets of an Entrepreneur: Innovators Forum Guest is a post from: EOS Worldwide

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Some organizations will excite you. They’ll stimulate your success and growth. Others will be stressful. They may lead you to…
HBR.org

When Choosing a Job, Culture Matters is a post from: EOS Worldwide