Are you more productive at home or the office?

I read an article recently about a large Chinese call center company that did an experiment with it's employees (no, not that kind of experiment!) letting them try working from home. They assigned half of their employees to continue working in the office and the other half worked from home. They found that the home working employees were more productive than the office working employees. Plus, the employees didn't have to commute to the office saving money on gas, work clothes and so on. The company found that the home working employees were 13% more productive. 9.5% of that productivity came from fewer sick days that were taken and 3.5% from actually taking more calls per hour.

Two very different conclusions from this: 1) people are less likely to be 'sick' if they work from home. Even if you do feel less than optimal, if you're at home, you can still get most of the work done. 2) I'm not at all surprised that people get more work done at home. Maybe it's not the same for everyone, but I like the quite atmosphere without all the phone calls and general office interruptions. I work at home and am very productive when I'm there for extended periods of time. 

Some folks are very distracted by the home atmosphere. I spoke to one friend who said she could never work at home. She'd be too tempted to do laundry or clean house. Ha! I'm never tempted by that. When I'm in my home office, I work. I have way more to do each day than I can possibly do anyway, so I have to prioritize and do the most important stuff. I never actually get to the bottom of the stack of things I'd like to do. Once the actual paying work is done, there's marketing and promotion work that awaits. 

Some people aren't as self-motivated as others. They perform better in an office environment where their surroundings are controlled. Is it tempting on a nice fall day to hang out on the patio in the sunshine and watch the birds and read a book. Sure. But that doesn't pay the bills, so you work. 

Do you have any tricks for staying on task and being more productive? If you do, why not share them with us?

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How does company culture impact your success?

A 2012 Deloitte study "Culture in the Workplace" as reported in Inc. magazine reveals interesting findings about workplace culture. The study suggests a strong correlation between company culture and workplace success:

• 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success
• 83% of executives and 84% of employees rank having engaged and motivated employees as the top factor that substantially contributes to a company's success

There were additional stats that suggest that executives and employees don't necessarily see eye-to-eye about whether their company has a great culture.

There's no denying that company culture is a big draw for a company like Apple. This awesome company culture allows Apple to have their pick of the tech world talent. Is their corporate success a result of that great talent pool? No doubt about it. Having a visionary leader is a good thing, but it's the actual employees that create the products and services, not visionary leaders, dead or alive.

Company culture, at the other end of the scale, can be a killer for attracting top talent. I've known many companies with a poor company culture  that can't hire the quality of employee that they need. Success suffers and the better employees who always have options, leave. The organization that's left is just a shell of what could have been. 

What's the state of your company culture? Do you actively work on improving the environment and creating a place where the best and brightest want to work? Or do you assume that an awesome company culture will grow itself? Well, it won't. You have to be proactive in creating an environment where employees are engaged and feel empowered. I've said for years that employees just want an environment where they can take pride in their work. But that's a lot easier said than done. It requires an owner or manager who can  create goals and set objectives, then get out of the way and let employees do their job. A company with a micromanaging owner or manager can never have a company culture that truly engages and motivates employees. By definition, a micromanaging owner sucks the life out of workers.

What are some of the basic things a business owner can do to create a great company culture? 

1. Stop micromanaging your employees. If an employee can't do the job, get one that can. If they can do the job, let them do it. It sounds so simple, but it's amazing how many owners and managers think they are the only ones smart enough to do the work.
2. Do your own job. As business owner, your job is to set the direction, create goals and objectives, hire good people, and set the example for customer focus. Do your job and let your employees do their job.
3. Hire the best employees you can afford. Another trait of micromanagers is their tendency to hire average to below-average employees. Most times, a micromanager is afraid of having an employee appear smarter or better able to do a particular task.  In reality, the best managers know that awesome employees do awesome work and make you look great.
4. Make employees feel like an important part of the process. Nothing kills motivation like corporate processes that make employees feel like what they do has no bearing on the bottom line, or customer satisfaction. 
5. Listen. When employees make suggestions for improving processes or products, give them an opportunity to express their thoughts. Give the employee an opportunity to develop the idea and/or do a feasibility analysis.

This is by no means a complete list. In fact, creating a great company culture is not so easy. If you have some other ideas, why not share them.

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Eat the Live Frog First

          “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen           to you the rest of the day.”   ~Mark Twain

I've been thinking about my morning routine lately. Lots of gurus have published papers, talks, video series and workshops about being more effective in your work day. One of the most famous, Tony Robbins, created the Hour of Power, a workday starter that includes exercise, motivational reading and even a gratitude exercise. Lots of others have similar programs to get your day started on the right foot.

One common theme, especially important for today's modern world, is not starting your day with email. Most of these workday effectiveness programs recommend not looking at your email until your first segment of the day is complete. That segment looks different for each program, but mostly involves getting a handle on your priority list of the day and completing that one big important item on your list. Hence the quote above. 

As our business grows and the work increases, it becomes more important to prioritize our work and remove distractions from our day. Becoming a better, more effective leader and business manager means handling our days with more effectiveness. The better you are and more effectively you run your business, the more people will want a part of your day. That's just natural. What's not natural, is finding a way to see the people you need to see to keep your business growing while not letting the distractions overwhelm you. 

I struggle with this just like everyone else. 

Do you have a strategy for managing your day more effectively? If so, why don't you share it with us.

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What's In A Name?

How do you pick a company name? I get asked this question frequently. It’s actually fairly simple in principal, but not so much in practice. Follow these 6 steps to help you come up with an interesting name for your business.

1. Keywords

Start with your keywords. Using Google AdWords or other SEO tool, figure out what keywords are right for your business. Rank the top 15 – 20 keywords and keep them handy whenever you are thinking about profiles, domain names, blog posts, or web content.

2. DOT Com Availability

With some general ideas in mind and your keyword list handy, use a URL registrar such as GoDaddy, to see what URLs are available in a ‘.com’ address. While there are no specific rules that say a .com is better than a .biz, the SEO experts I’ve asked about this all concur that a .com will rank higher than a .anything else.  However, finding a .com will be difficult, since most of the .com names that also follow rules 3 – 5, have been taken.

3. Easy to Pronounce

Don’t pick some name that your target customer can’t pronounce. If you’re in France or the middle of Louisiana, then picking a funky sounding Cajun word will be fine. Otherwise, pick a name that average customers, namely your target customers, can easily pronounce.

4. Easy to Spell

Akin to #3, pick a name that can easily be spelled. If people can’t spell your name, they won’t be able to find your website, nor will they find you in a phone book. Yeah, there are still a few folks around, like my father, who still depend on the yellow pages to find your business. Don’t pick a stupid and/or incorrect spelling trying to be cute. Your customers may not get the joke. Then you’re just creating a situation where you have to spend your marketing budget teaching your target audience your name instead of why your business is so cool.

5. Short

Choose a name that is as short as possible. If your business name has 68 letters, nobody will be using their smart phone to look you up. And since that’s how the majority of people will find you, make it easy on them. Of course by making it easy on your customers, you help insure that they actually find your business.

6. URL & Sign are the Same

Your business name, as it appears on your sign, should be, if at all possible, the same as your URL. Remember, it’s difficult enough to get people to remember you, if they have to remember two different names for your business you’re cutting your own throat. Just like in rule #4 above, don’t cut your own throat.

If you need some help naming your business, creating a brand or marketing strategy, give us a call.

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3 Steps to Business Idea Evaluation

In the last post, I spoke about evaluating a business idea to determine whether it's the next Pet Rock, or sinking like a rock.

There are 3 basic steps for determining top-level viability. You want to determine if this idea is reasonable before you spend months of time and potentially lots of money. There's no sense doing all that extensive research, building relationships with potential partners, and spending money on anything, if in the end, the financial results don't meet your needs.  This is not a complete business or marketing plan. Don't go saying that Chris said this is all you have to do. I'm not saying that at all. It's merely a first round go/no-go evaluation. It's the first of many before you decide to launch a business. 

These are the basic steps:

1. Understand the Market
2. Consider your Marketing Strategy
3. Calculate the Profitability & Cash Flow

If the profitability and cash flow don't meet you needs, go back and modify the business model and see what affect that has. If you can't achieve the level of financial success that you want, then abandon the idea and move on the the next one. 

So these are the area's you'll evaluate, but what questions, specifically, are you trying to answer?

1. Market: Are there enough potential customers in the market?
2. Marketing Strategy: How will you convince those potential customers to buy from you?
3. Financials: Do the profitability and cash flow results meet your needs?

If the answers to these questions support your goals, then keep going to the next step. As you continue learning new information that changes anything significant piece of the evaluation, then run the three step process again. Keep moving forward with your research and evaluation, partnership building and business plan writing as long as the three questions continue giving you answers that meet your needs. 


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How to Evaluate a Business Idea

You've got a great idea for a business, well, you think it's good anyway. How do you know? How do you evaluate a business idea and when in the evaluation process do you decide whether to move forward or ditch the idea and look for another opportunity?

I work the idea viability analysis as a continuous pass-fail process. What I mean by that is I continually evaluate the idea and make it pass, or move on. For folks who are looking, there are way more ideas than time to evaluate them. So it's important to be honest with yourself and pass on everything that doesn't meet your evaluation criteria or your needs.

When evaluating a business idea, start by doing a little research. Understand the market, how business is conducted, and the competition. Consider how the current trends in the industry will affect how business is done in the future. Identify your target customer and determine if the market is large enough to support another competitor of your size. 

Next, think about how you will position your company and products in the market. Determine how much budget you'll need to accomplish your revenue goals and create a basic marketing strategy.

Now comes the hard part. Based on your preliminary research and marketing strategy, how many units of revenue do you expect to achieve? Create a sales projection for a couple of years, by month. Yes, I realize that anything past about 3 or 4 months is a guess, but at least it's an educated guess. You need to understand the profitability and cash flow model in order to evaluate the idea. So, give it your best guess. Make sure to consider how normal industry or seasonal cycles will affect your projections. Don't take a yearly projection and divide it by 12. Think about what the revenue will look like each month. 

The rest is just math. How big an organization is needed to support a business with that revenue level? Subtract the cost of generating that kind of revenue, subtract it from the net sales to get gross margin. Then, subtract operating expenses to determine net income. Next, figure out the cash flow implications. If everything seems to make sense, then continue with your evaluation. If not, abandon the idea and move on.

This is a quick and dirty top level evaluation to determine whether to move forward with an idea. It's not a business plan. It's not a full-fledged marketing plan. It's just a go/no-go first evaluation, before you spend weeks or months working out the details, forming the partnerships and spending money building a business idea into a company. 

If you need help evaluating your great idea, give us a call.

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Huntsville: Engine Capital of The World?

Huntsville has long been know as the 'rocket city' and by some the space capital of the world. But Atushi Niimi, the Executive Vice President of Toyota Motor Corp. says he hopes to make Huntsville the engine capital of the world. He was quoted in a November 2011 article in Business Alabama magazine.


Toyota will add 4-cylinder production to the 6-cylinder and 8-cylinder production already in use at their North Huntsville manufacturing facility. The plant employees about 1,000 people and provides a significant economic stimulus to the Tennessee Valley. The addition to the Toyota plant also marks a significant investment to the growing auto industry in North Alabama and South Central Tennessee. 


As a right-to-work state, Alabama is an interesting location for industries traditionally burdened by oppressive unions. Alabama also had a robust state economic development effort guided by the ADO (Alabama Development Office) out of Montgomery as well as a unified Madison-Huntsville-Madison County effort to drive economic growth in the area. After many years of fighting between the cities and county, we now have a team all working on the same goals. Instead of fighting with each other over jobs and opportunities, the three groups are working together to promote the entire area. The results have been easy to see.


There's lots of good reasons to pick the greater Huntsville area to locate business. But did anyone forsee that North Alabama would be hub for the automotive industry? I sure didn't. And I'm not suggesting that cars and parts manufacturing will take the place of defense and aerospace here. The most recent BRAC has elevated Redstone Arsenal in importance within the defense arena with the transfer of many important commands, like the Army Materiel Command. 


Having a more diversified economic base is almost always a good thing. Cuts in defense budgets that are looming will mean cuts to jobs. Having other industries to pick up the slack is good. Who would have dreamed that the industry that killed Detroit's future will be the a bright spot in ours?

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