Pretend You Own the Company

The most important thing your work can offer you is a chance to feel good about yourself. Do you see yourself as a productive, contributing member of your company? Do you know why your company exists? When you realize what your company offers to society, you’ll be able to understand what part you play.

Work with the attitude that you own the company that employs you. (Even if you do!) You earn your money from your employer by doing more than you are paid to do. According to the “law of sow and reap,” you will get noticed for being an exceptional worker, so never worry about giving your employers “something for nothing.” More important, you’ll feel good about yourself because you will be a productive person with a part in your company’s future. Reaping the rewards of self-satisfaction, no matter what you are paid, is the true measure of the work you do, whether in love, your career, or your life.

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What to Ask Before You Hire

Few things can waste more valuable time and resources or cause more morale problems than mismatching the person and the job. As a busy executive, you want to get the most out of your people while protecting your investment in their training.

Good employees turn up, not by magic, but through good hiring practices, and smart hiring starts with smart interviewing. After you’ve asked the usual “resume” questions — job history, education, salary expectations, etc. — probe your prospect with questions that will illuminate their hopes, goals, inclinations, and reservations.

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Keeping up with the vigilante consumer: customer retention, customer service

  • If you increase customer retention just 5% more, your profits will increase 100%.
  • U.S. population growth is projected to be 1.1% in the next twenty years.
  • Disposable income in the US is growing only 2% every year.
  • US businesses will invest more than $1 billion this year on computer technology, just for customer service departments.

The interesting bits of information above basically mean that the number of customers are dwindling. Which is why customer service is today’s competitive advantage. If we don’t have masses of potential customers, we’d better keep the ones we do have happy. Ecstatic.

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Tips From An Unabashed, Self-Promoter

I’m always taken aback when someone asks me how much time I devote to marketing. Every single thing I do is marketing. Talking to strangers at seminars or group meetings or even in elevators or taxis is marketing. Customer service is part of marketing. I am an unabashed, relentless, promoter of my services and products. I get the drive from the love I have for this business. Here are a few suggestions on how you can attract, retain and extend your relationship with customers:

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What Can Teleseminars Do for YOUR Business?

If you’re not already conducting teleseminars, you should think about some of the advantages they could offer you. Recently, I talked to Dan Janal, founder of Great Teleseminars, about ways this new technology can help build your business and increase your company’s cash flow. Here are some of the benefits that Daniel describes.

Make more money. You can make thousands of dollars in registration fees depending on the size of your audience and the importance of the topic. Great Teleseminars Audio Production Studios, http://www.GreatTeleseminars.com has several clients making six-figure incomes from teleseminars over the course of one year. One recently made $30,000 in one hour by offering the right topic, at the right price, to the right audience.

Beat your competition by improving your image and building your brand name. When you conduct teleseminars, you will be perceived as a trusted expert, an innovator, and a leader within your field.

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What’s Your Cat’s Name? a Team-Building Exercise

Games are an ancient and fun way to get people interacting, even in stressful situations. At one of my seminars, an attendee, Susan Peters of BorgWarner PTC Shared Services, shared this technique that she and her colleagues had found very valuable.

“After one of the sessions,” said Susan, “we spoke briefly about our company’s struggles while we are combining five divisions under one ‘happy roof’ with a shared services department acting as the building cheerleaders. In addition to the day-to-day payroll, our jobs are HR, IT, and finance, getting everyone to work together as a team.

“As a team-building exercise within the Shared Services area, we were all instructed to send three interesting facts about ourselves to the meeting organizer, Laurie Schamber, Manager of Organizational Learning. Her staff then took these facts and made up bingo cards, no two alike. When we got to the meeting, we were each handed a card and given twenty minutes to quiz the others in the room, trying to match the people to their squares on their card.

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Use an Interesting Statistic

A great way to open a talk or presentation is to cite some intriguing statistics that endorse your premise, are out of the ordinary, totally unexpected, or are not well known. This could be something you read in the Wall Street Journal, trade magazines that are unfamiliar to the audience, the annual report, website or newsletter of the company you are addressing, or perhaps you hear in church.

These statistics can be directly related to the organization or industry, or they could be general observations. Anything you can make pertinent to your topic is fair game. It can be deadly serious, like “One in four people will be affected by cancer. Either them directly or a family member.” This made my late friend Cantu’s talk “Laughing all the Way to the Hospital” more of a human interest story than just his experience. It can also be fun and frivolous, like, “Women born since 1960 are likely to have more husbands than children.” This can lead into a talk on changes in society.

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Spotting the Leaders

This is a story my Fripp Associate David Palmer, PhD told at our recent speaking skills class. Hope it makes you think and act like a leader.

It was 1952. The Korean War had been going for three years…and the North Koreans were short of resources, especially soldiers.

Both sides continued to take POW’s, but it took money to build high-security prison camps…and a lot of soldiers to guard them.

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Be a Star in Your Private Life

It’s okay to be a star in public, but the most important role you’ll ever play is in your private life.

When superstar speaker and author Scott McKain was an entertainment reporter in Indianapolis, one evening he and his wife Sherry were waiting for friends to join them for dinner. The friends arrived twenty minutes late, apologizing and giggling. They had been at K-Mart and seen a woman who looked so much like Meryl Streep that they couldn’t resist watching her shop from a discreet distance.

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Is It Time for Your Speaking Business to Go More High-tech?

On February 15, 2001, I woke up for the first time in 26 years without a full-time personal assistant. How did I feel about it? It was exhilarating! Of course, now and then I miss having someone to do what I am not crazy about doing, but it was time for me to take charge of my business in a whole new way. Over the years, one assistant has trained the next and although they had had wonderful strengths, also weaknesses. Fortunately, the wealth of new technology lets me reinvent how I now want to run my business and marketing for the 21st Century.

Any speaker trying to maintain an efficient office headquarters while on the road will appreciate how quickly the new technologies have been coming to their aid. I’ve been self-employed since 1975 and had my own full-time speaking business since 1984. When I reached the age of 55, I asked myself two questions:

  • How do I want to live the second half of my life?
  • How do I want to run my business for the second half of my life?

Technology is making big changes in nearly every speaker’s business. All of us already have technological capabilities that we aren’t taking full advantage of. I am constantly learning how to automate many of the processes available to us.

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