Business Building Workshops – Business Planning
Leadership As A Management Tool
All business owners must out of necessity be managers. But that doesn’t necessarily make them a leader. The two are not the same, though unfortunately, people rarely take the time to consider the difference and what each contributes to the success of their business.
The role of leader involves more than just managing - it involves the ability to create a vision for their firm, determine the strategies required to get there, and motivating their team to work towards it. You do it with the aim of getting people aligned and moving in one direction--the direction that will make your business really fly.
This topic covers:
· The vital difference between being a manager and being a leader
· The essential role of leadership in business, and
· The basic technical and emotional intelligence skills of a leader
Handouts include:
Ø Motivation In The Workplace Questionnaire
Ø Sharing Your Vision Questionnaire
Ø Characteristics of Admired Leaders
Ø Discussion of Private spaceship article
Ø Action Item Worksheet (with link to T-P Leadership Questionnaire)
Failing To Plan Is Planning To Fail
This topic covers the benefits of developing a business plan in gaining increased control over business operations and improved opportunities to step back and work ON rather than IN the business. Describes how to create a complete plan for the business, or just a set of action steps covering, the critical areas of operation.
The business plan is an excellent tool in defining your personal assets and liabilities, describing the competitive conditions in your market, your financial needs, ways to promote your products and services, and assess the skill sets your team needs to be most productive.
From this topic, your clients (or your team members) will learn the key steps required to create a plan document for their business and how to use it in their sales processes, to aid in inducting team members, to deal with banks and other capital sources, and to educate new suppliers about the nature of the business.
Handouts include:
Ø Motivation In The Workplace Questionnaire
Ø Time Log
Ø Organizational Chart
Ø Action Item Worksheet
Time Management
Effective time management is about increasing your personal efficiency in achieving goals. The benefits are not only personal though, from a reduced stress level, but it means your business will be more efficiently run as well. It's about getting control, sure that you are not tyrannized by a
Time Management (Continued)
series of apparently urgent tasks. It's about giving the right proportion of your time to planning for the future as well as day-to-day tasks.
Time management involves honing two business skills in particular - organizing and prioritizing - by developing a set of techniques that ensure you have clear, uninterrupted time to concentrate ON the business.
This topic provides solutions to help you get ahead of the game by prioritizing your tasks according to importance and systematizing your routines for dealing with them. It also includes tools for measuring levels of procrastination and perfectionism and provides strategies for dealing with these in the work place.
Handouts include:
Ø Procrastination Self-Assessment Tool
Ø Perfectionism Self-Assessment Tool
Ø Task Planning Guide to Rate Tasks
Ø Action Item Worksheet
SWOT: Your Business Health Check
The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is a systematic diagnosis of the external and internal factors that affect the profitability and market success of any business. By looking at both the negative and positive elements simultaneously it provides a simple, rounded perspective on evaluating a particular business idea, an area of operations, or the business as a whole. It can also suggest strategies for responding to the situations you will uncover - how to build on established strengths, minimize weaknesses, seize opportunities and counteract threats.
This workshop is an opportunity to sell both other workshop topics and your business diagnostic and performance improvement services.
Handouts include:
Ø BCG Matrix
Ø Action Item Worksheet
Sustaining Competitive Advantage
Basically, there are three main ways in which you can compete in the marketplace:
· On Price
· By serving a niche market better than anybody else
· On the individuality of your product or service
Which of these is the better long-term strategy? Undoubtedly a lower price than the competitor is an immediate advantage - but will it deliver a continuing competitive edge? Differentiating your products from your competitors will provide a much harder to match advantage for your business. This topic concentrates on how to deliver benefits that exceed those of competing products, by developing a differentiation strategy.
Sustaining Competitive Advantage (Continued)
Drawing on some of Michael Porter’s ideas on how competition actually works in the business world, this topic explores the value of performing a competitive analysis on your business while reviewing the five competitive forces:
· Bargaining Power of Suppliers
· Bargaining Power of Customers
· Threat of New Entrants
· Threat of Substitutes
· Competitive Rivalry
This information will enable you to focus on how your products rate against those of competitors and thus in turn you can make informed decisions about the sort of strategy to use with your product to gain the best competitive advantage.
Handouts include:
Ø Five Forces Worksheet
§ Business Rivalry Analysis
§ Customer Buying Power Analysis
§ Supplier Selling Power Analysis
§ Threat of Substitutes Analysis
§ New Rivals Analysis
Ø External Environment Analysis Worksheet (PEST)
§ Political
§ Economic
§ Social
§ Technology
Ø Competitor Analysis Worksheet
Ø How Competition Works (Five Forces Diagram)
Unique Core Differentiators
Perception is the reality-people buy based on differences They Perceive. It's the differences that potential customers perceive that make them choose one business over another. And those differences make the customer feel more confident about their final decision as well.
Unique Core Differentiators (UCDs) clearly articulate what makes your business different. They are the special things about your product or service or business that compels customers to buy from you rather than your competitors. Well-formed differentiators target your customer's 'hot buttons,' real buying concerns, or key frustrations. In one statement it educates them about exactly why they should buy from you.
This topic will help you to identify or create your own UCD's and will provide strategies for ensuring that all of your marketing efforts clearly articulate why you are unique and why customers should buy from you.
Handouts include:
Ø Unique Core Differentiators Worksheet
§ Three types of UCD’s
§ Looking at UCD’s from someone else’s perspective
Ø Unique Cord Differentiators Grid
Building A Winning Team
What business owner at some time hasn’t despaired of ever freeing themselves from constantly having to think for their employees? Who hasn’t wished they had people who could work more cooperatively to sort out things for themselves and come up with effective solutions, maybe to even be feeding ideas back into the business about how to improve things?
To get people operating this way you need to turn your group into a team. And to do that you need to know how to build a business culture that will encourage teamwork to happen. But that’s only part of the story - the leader has to know the skills that will maintain team morale.
This workshop covers how to build a team in a small business by looking at how to introduce structures to promote teamwork and discussing the leadership skills needed to keep a team together. This workshop will also include excerpts from “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Leadership”, by John Maxwell.
Handouts include:
Ø Importance Meter Worksheet
Ø Vision Killers Analysis
Ø Analyzing Your Credibility Factor Questionnaire
Ø Credibility Factor Questionnaire
Ø Credibility Factor Personal Application Analysis (video)
Ø Handling Difficult Coworkers Article
Recruiting Good People
Having skilled competent people on the team represents a real competitive advantage – you will be able to produce higher quality product and deliver better customer service than competitors. And importantly, it will give you the opportunity to step back and work ON the business instead of needing to constantly manage everyone and being caught up working IN it.
However, recruiting top performers is one of the most difficult tasks a business owner will undertake and will only be successful if a number of best practice recruiting routines are followed so as to become more efficient and more aggressive in locating good candidates and selecting the applicant with the qualities you really need.
This workshop discusses how to improve procedures for:
· Sourcing candidates
· Selecting candidates from the applicants
· Interviewing applicants to establish actual skill level
· Testing for the necessary skills
· Using a probationary period to establish the fit of the new employee before final commitment
· Meeting labor law requirements for recruitment and hiring practices
Handouts include:
Ø Vision Communication Exercise
Ø Tips For Avoiding Common Mistakes
Money Isn’t Everything! Smart Ways To Recognize And Reward Your Team
There are a number of ways of looking at remuneration. You might think of it as a negative-a cost to your business. On the other hand, you could look upon it as an investment given that the right compensation package can help you attract and keep good people in your business. This topic looks at several innovative ways of structuring remuneration and reward systems that are not simply about money.
Surveys consistently find that money is only one reason that people take, or stay in a job. Some of the other reasons fall into the category of rewards. This means that you’ve got room to move when you’re setting salaries and wages or giving raises.
Learn about how to adopt good positive management practices and reward your team well, so that you’ll be under less pressure to offer salaries at the top of the range while, at the same time enhancing employee performance and boosting the productivity of your business.
Handouts include:
Ø College Grad Survey Results
Ø The Need Satisfaction Process Flowchart
Ø Maslow’s Need Hierarchy
Ø Alderfer’s ERG Theory
Ø The Twelve Questions (from First, Break All The Rules)
Ø Recognizing Needs Questionnaire and Analysis Tool
Ø Suggestions Worksheet
Ø Motivation In The Workplace Questionnaire
The Elevator Speech
Have you ever been presented with that golden opportunity - a chance meeting with a potential big customer? Suddenly you scored one short window of opportunity to get this person interested in your products or services. And you blew it!
You need to develop an ‘elevator speech’!
An ‘elevator speech’ is a concise, carefully planned, and well-practiced description about your company that your aunt should be able to understand in the time it would take to travel a couple of floors in an elevator.
This presentation shows you how to put together your ‘elevator speech’ – what to put in and just as importantly, the turnoff statements to leave out. It also shows you how you can develop it to work anywhere from in the elevator to a business club meeting.
Handouts include:
Ø The Elevator Speech Worksheet
§ Product/Service
§ Market
§ Customers
§ Benefit
§ Competitive Advantage
The Power Of Word Of Mouth
Businesses have always known that a good reputation is key to success. They know that if they keep their customers happy, word will spread and their business will grow. Equally, bad news can travel fast. If a business provides poor service or sells poor quality products, word will soon get around and hurt sales.
Word of mouth marketing is emerging as a key tool for many businesses as traditional advertising becomes less effective due to increasing consumer skepticism. Consumers are more likely to make purchase decisions based on the opinions, rumors and anecdotes that they hear through the many informal networks they belong to. Good word of mouth can be the greatest marketing asset of a business.
However, most businesses are only just becoming aware that there are strategies they can use to generate good word of mouth. This topic looks at how to use networks to facilitate the spread of good word of mouth about your business and how to capture the interest of opinion leaders and early adopters to ensure your message is passed on.
Handouts include:
Ø Book Summary – The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Market
Ø Web Articles
§ Create the Buzz for Your Business
§ How and Why to Research Word-of-Mouth
§ 7 Strategies to Develop Word-of-Mouth Advertising Campaign
§ Clik2complaints.com overview
Leading Change
The amount of change in organizations has grown tremendously over the past two decades, and the rate of change will only accelerate in the next few decades. No wonder change, and leadership through change, is foremost concerns of business owner’s today.
Through this workshop, we will draw from the book, Leading Change by John Kotter. In addition to a detailed discussion of the eight stages to lead change, this workshop will also include discussions on:
· Why change fails.
· Why competent management is required to keep change efforts on track.
· Why only leadership can blast through the many sources of corporate inertia.
· Why only leadership can motivate the actions needed to alter behavior significantly.
· Why only leadership can get change to stick, anchoring it in the culture.
This workshop will discuss the importance of the eight steps and how skipping even a single step, or getting too far ahead without a solid base almost always creates problems.
Handouts include:
Ø Vision Spirit Killers
Ø Communication Channels Overview
Ø Identifying Managers/Employees Handout
Ø Key Message Template
Ø ADKAR Leading Change Model