October 3, 2022

Why claptrap and copying will never make you audacious or unique

Why claptrap and copying will never make you audacious or unique.

There are many challenges facing leaders who are in the hunt to grow their business.

Some are beyond the leader’s direct control, like economic fluctuations and specific competitor attacks.

But there are other challenges that are under direct leadership control that, if successfully met, make a HUGE impact on the growth trajectory of the business.

I pay attention to the actions organizations take to grow, and through my blogs and podcasts I share what worked for me as a leader of an early stage business that we amazingly grew to A BILLION IN SALES.

But there are two tactics businesses continue to employ on a regular basis that drive me crazy, despite the fact that in my 4 decades of leadership experience they detract from creating competitive advantage and adding strategic value.

#1. CLAPTRAP COMPETITIVE CLAIMS

There is an extreme lack of clarity in organizations in terms of how they declare their uniqueness over their competitors, i.e. their competitive advantage.

And the answer to the question “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?” is lost in the fog of aspirations and good intentions.
The customer is left to their own devices to filter through the CLAPTRAP to discover what’s real and what’s pure fabrication.

Everyone declares who they are and how they are different from their competitors using words—CLAPTRAP—like:

“BETTER, BEST, #1, LEADER, PREMIUM, MOST COMPELLING, MOST RELIABLE, GREAT TASTING, FIRST EVER, LOWEST COST”

But how can these words be believed? What do the words even mean? And if everyone uses them, how can they benefit any of the users?

It’s business obfuscation at play and it drives me nuts!

I would say—based on observation—that literally 99% of businesses these days use expressions like:

- “We offer the best coffee and espresso drinks for consumers who want premium ingredients and perfection every time.”
- “We work hard every day to make us the world’s most respected service brand.”
- “Canada’s largest and most reliable 5G network.”
- “We are on a mission to make neighborhoods safer. Our suite of affordable solutions make smart security accessible to all.”
- “We provide premium, real ingredients for customers looking for delicious food that’s ethically sourced and freshly prepared.”
- “We are the market leaders in communications technology.”
- “I develop sustainable business models and marketing strategies to fuel small business growth.”
- “I help manufacturing organizations improve their processes to reduce waste and grow profits.”
- “Helping you build a big brand with your small business.”

These CLAPTRAP-ridden statements may have some redeeming value to leadership who want to advocate and promulgate organizational values for employees to model and exhibit, but they do little to declare to customers the unique value proposition an organization has over its competition.

And many also take CLAPTRAP up a notch and use ASPIRATIONS to further contaminate the work of distancing one organization from another:

- “We’re in business to save our home planet.”
- “To inspire humanity – both in the air and on the ground.”
These are at best helium-filled statements that don’t separate companies and add little to meeting the challenge of differentiation.

CLAPTRAP and ASPIRATIONS need to be expunged from the leadership tool kitbag.

My solution, one that has been successfully used in our journey to A BILLION IN SALES is The ONLY Statement, my way of applying ‘precision to the promise’ of what separates you from your competitors.

“We are the ONLY ones who…” is specific, understandable, binary and measurable

ONLY examples:
✔️ ”Kimberly Lebbing is The ONLY High-Performance Success & Mindset Expert Helping Business Owners, Entrepreneurs, and Their Teams Get Mind-Blowing Results in as Little as 4 Hours.”
✔️ “ONLY TELUS PureFibre has upload speeds as fast as download speeds, and a 100% fibre optic connection that runs direct to your home—so you can binge without buffering.”
✔️ “The North Delta Business Association is the ONLY team that: Links you to other businesses, connects you with experienced & knowledgeable people to help you lead & grow your business, and constantly challenges you to do things differently.”
✔️ “St John Ambulance is the ONLY First Aid Advocate that provides safety solutions anywhere, anytime.”
✔️ ”We provide the ONLY permanent solution that prevents biohazard contaminants (such as used syringes) and all other debris from entering manholes.”
✔️ ”We are the ONLY team that provides integrated safety solutions that go beyond the needs of our customers ANYTIME, ANYWHERE. We are committed to growing our customer’s business. We ONLY serve safety.”
✔️ ”Roy Osing is the ONLY author, entrepreneur and executive leader who delivers practical and proven Audacious Unheard-of Ways to build high performing businesses and successful careers.”
✔️ ”Roy is the ONLY coach and advisor who offers The ONLY Statement as a practical and proven tool to create a competitive advantage for organizations and individuals.”

#2. BENCHMARKING

The second thing organizations do that keeps me up at night is benchmarking, landing on ‘best in class’ and copying them.

Benchmarking is problematic on several levels:

#1. Copying sucks. — It’s ‘sucking up’ to an organization or individual recognized (by someone presumed to be the thought leader) to be the best at performing a particular function and is therefore the organization you should aspire to be.

It doesn’t make you special. It may help you improve your position in the crowd of hungry competitors by being more efficient at something, but it won’t help you stand out from them by being more relevant or unique to your customers.

Copying is the enemy of being different. The maximum benefit you can achieve by copying is best in class levels of performance which may return better operating results than previously obtained but unless you vault beyond these levels true differentiation won’t happen.

#2. Being in the herd sucks. — The herd is a place where organizations go to blend in with others; to conform with what others do and to lose the DNA attributes that make them special.

Even if you are the ‘best of breed’ you’re still in the herd. It’s just that you execute a process better than any other herd member; you’re still rubbing shoulders with your sameness brethren.

And because you’re tagged ‘the best’, you have no motivation to break away from the herd; you find consolation in it.

The world is becoming a home for best practice addicts and as a result it’s boring and benign.

#3. Conforming sucks. — Benchmarking results in conformance; it sucks any unique thinking you may have out of your system and replaces it with the need to capitulate to the leader of the herd.

Rather than look for a unique solution to your problem, you look for another herd member that has put in the work to create a solution that works for them and you assume you can boilerplate it and it will work for you.

When you copy someone or something, you relegate—subordinate—yourself to them. You roll over, put your ‘paws in the air’ and subsume yourself to the leadership of someone else. Looking up when you’re lying on the ground isn’t a very liberating place to be.

#4. Being like your competitors sucks.— It has no strategic value in moving the organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY you occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about improving how they conduct business, and the benchmarking process ensues — adding zero space between them and their competitors.

And, of course, if you’re chasing another organization, you’re adding nothing to the kitbag of things that make you ‘special’ in the eyes of your customers and encouraging them to spread your word to others and attract new business.

If you copy someone, all you do is lower the bar and increase the herd by one.

#5. Not trying new things sucks. — If you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator. Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which seem to be values organizations covet in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

In fact benchmarking kills real innovation because it has performance improvement using the standard of another as its end game as opposed to revolutionary changes that determine new strategic outcomes.

We need to get our thinking straight.

Few organizations today stand out, which is sad; few are deemed to be really special by their customers.
Being remarkable isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, or if it is, it’s an elusive goal because leaders allow people to use traditional tools — like benchmarking best of class — to do their jobs.

Uniqueness, remarkability and being special come from being different than your competitors, not copying what they and others do, even if they perform certain functions more efficiently than you do.

We need to change our ways and put copying where it belongs.

Let’s:
▪️Start thinking about being different from best in class, not copying best of breed.
▪️Covet being ‘different from breed’, not best of breed.
▪️Think about doing what others are not doing, not looking to other’s successes.
▪️Go in the opposite direction that others are going, not following in their footsteps.
▪️Define best in class to be the highest bar to be different from, not emulate.
▪️Purge boilerplates from our toolbox and break new ground (and maybe be the author of a new boilerplate).

Copying is the enemy of being special and remarkable.

And as audacious leaders, let’s change the conversation in our organizations; purging the notion of benchmarking and copying as ways of achieving strategic progress by asking these types of questions of our teams:

▪️”What can we do to be different from the crowd of competitors?”;
▪️“How does what you’re proposing make us stand out from the competition and be special to our customers?”.
▪️“What crazy ‘insane’ thing is a different business to ours doing and how can we use the basics of the idea to morph it into a special idea for us?”

I can’t sleep at night when the world continues to be infatuated with CLAPTRAP, ASPIRATIONS and COPYING.

Do me a favour and STOP! doing these two things so I can get at least 4 hours of ZZZ’s every night.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 10.3.22 at 05:01 am by Roy Osing
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September 12, 2022

11 simple and proven ways to scale your business for amazing results

11 simple and proven ways to scale your business for amazing results.

There’s much talk these days about the need to scale a business; in fact I recently did a podcast show dedicated to the topic.

So, let’s start with some basics. What do we mean when we say we want to ‘scale’ our business? In the simplest sense, scaling a business seeks to grow revenue faster than cost. If revenue increases at 10% over time and cost increases at 5%, we can say we’ve successfully scaled our business. If revenue growth = cost growth or if revenue grows at a slower rate than costs, we’ve been unsuccessful and our business has NOT been scaled.

Successfully scaling a business results when top line revenue growth is disproportionate to cost growth.

I think there is some misunderstanding around the subject because I hear people talk only about the cost side of the equation.

They focus on cost infrastructure only, and driving the supply costs down to scale their business without considering the revenue component of the equation.

This approach has serious consequences:

▪️It could fail at scaling because cost growth could still exceed revenue growth even though costs have been reduced under a different infrastructure plan. Overall costs may have been reduced by 25% but they are expected to continue to grow at 5% in the face of a revenue growth of 4% — the business has not been scaled.
▪️The second potential issue is that by unhooking cost from revenue driver, you could actually be building infrastructure that is disconnected to a degree from sales, furthering impairing the ability to grow revenue.

A scaling strategy should START WITH REVENUE, to look for the optimum ways to grow in a way that is sustainable over time. Cost options—including supply infrastructure—should then follow to determine the lowest cost growth option to deliver revenue goals.

Remember: both cost objectives must be satisfied: low overall cost structure AND cost growth rates less than revenue growth.

These are some revenue strategies that helped me scale a business to A BILLION.

#1. Business strategy — The ability to scale starts with the right business strategy and my Strategic Game Plan—SGP—practice that delivers the right strategy built to EXECUTE.

Scaling requires a focused game plan that enables flawless execution.

#2. Business processes — Process follows strategy. Create/align internal business processes to serve the SGP explicitly and be targeted to its strategic priorities.

Your business process elements must work harmoniously together in order to generate the kind of revenue needed to scale your business.

#3. Team — Structure follows process. The right organization structure is required to effectively use the business processes established to execute the SGP and to allocate resources for maximum strategic return.

For maximum impact on revenues, insource customer facing functions; if you must outsource anything, outsource back end functions.

#4. Customer loyalty — Existing customers will give you more revenue at lower incremental cost than trying to acquire new customers.
And referrals come to you at close-to-zero cost of sales.
I’ve spoken at length about how you can build a loyal base of fans, but here are a few snippets:
— Create your Customer Service Strategy with CORE vs DAZZLE elements.
— Build a Recovery Culture so when mistakes happen, loyalty is strengthened not destroyed.
— Offer special deals for existing customers to reward their loyalty. Resist the temptation to use discounted promotions to attract new customers.
— Add ‘Customer Managers’ to your organization to ensure to focus on ‘The Loyal Ones’ rather than having simply a product focus.

#5. Sales relationship building — Morph your sales force to concentrate more on building long term customer relationships and less on flogging products.
This will not only reduce churn in your customer base, it will also enable premium priced solution sales due to the high trust factor and the more intimate understanding sales has of the customer’s operations.

Strong long term relationships breed more revenue at less cost.

#6. Premium pricing — Package your products and services into holistic solutions that can be provided at premium prices. Avoid the bundling mentality of bundling products together and offering the bundle at discounted prices.
Target your packaging efforts at customer segments that have a strong ’CRAVE Factor’,driven to buy on what they desire and want rather than on what they need.

CRAVE segments have lower price sensitivity and fewer competitors hence the revenue potential and lower costs is huge.

#7. Process Leadership — Assign leaders cross-organization process ownership as a way of increasing effectiveness—lower costs—of cross functional delivery systems.
For example, the marketing executive could be the owner of the product and service fulfillment process and would be accountable to deliver more output at lower cost.
The problem in organizations today is that no single executive owns a cross functional process because of the silo structure where everyone has their own piece of the action and no one owns the whole process.

To increase the revenue leverage of cost inputs we need process ownership at the highest level.

#8. Recruitment — Recruit the right people to build long term customer relationships and more customer loyalty.
As the priority, hire people who ‘love’ humans. Give customer facing—demand—units in the organization the priority.

#9. A ‘clean’ inside — Effective execution—hence more revenue and less cost—occurs not only when internal systems and processes run smoothly as referred to earlier, but also when the organization is focussing on the things that NEED to be done.
Often, legacy activity lingers throughout the organization, consuming cost and offering little on the revenue line.

Leaders must stop doing the stuff that is no longer a strategic priority. They must CUT the CRAP and eradicate the GRUNGE that gets in the way of flawless execution .

A new form of innovation must be introduced—‘DELETE’ Innovation—to eliminate unproductive activity and assets in order to release more unit revenue and less unit cost.

#10. Dumb Rules — A version of #9, this initiative is required to eliminate the rules, processes and policies that make no sense to customers and threaten their loyalty.
What is needed is a cultural mindset that seeks to ENABLE the customer to do business with you on their terms rather than one which falls victim to internal control.
A healthy balance—however skewed to what the customer expects—is needed with a customer control outcome not a company control one.

#11. Line of sight leadership — To achieve precision in strategy EXECUTION, everyone needs to understand their precise role, because if they don’t, dysfunction results and scaling suffers because costs outrun revenue generation.

To avoid this situation, leaders must provide line of sight from what employees to to what the strategy of the organization expects.

Line of sight leaders translate the strategy into what it means to marketing, sales, customer service, and every other function in the organization to get their teams marching in unison.

When this happens, maximum output for minimal input results and SCALE is achieved.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

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• Posted 9.12.22 at 04:03 am by Roy Osing
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August 29, 2022

How an employee can easily break loose when they are forced to conform

How an employee can easily break loose when they are forced to conform.

The reality is that sometimes an employee is confronted with a culture that encourages sameness: copying best in class organizations, following academic pedagogy, complying with non-practical consultant advice and conforming to many internal company practices.

Some organizations want you to comply, but there are ways of breaking out.

They feel stifled; stepping out from accepted norms in terms of how their job is performed is simply not an option if one is to avoid being labeled as a loner—not a team player—and if they want to keep their job.

So what options does someone have if they want to be creative and be different but the culture says conform to the traditional established scripture?

First, recognize that the world is not black or white; either fit in or step out are not the only considerations when faced with this dilemma.

This is the approach that I used in an organization that reeked of adhering to strict standards.

#1. Define the areas of the job where conformance is expected and no deviation is tolerated.

If, for example, copying best practices is mandated for a specific function in sales like sales funnel management in order to have everyone doing it consistently then accept it and perform the function in amazing fashion.

#2. Define other aspects of your current role where compliance rules haven’t been defined and step out in these areas.

To illustrate how you might go about stepping out of the conformance challenge, here are some simple actions that worked for me to perform my roles differently than others and shed the shackles of compliance.

#1. Personal brand — Build your personal brand strategy on the principle of standing out from the crowd. You need a strategy to guide your actions outside of the conformity zone. Look for opportunities to breakaway in areas that add value to the organization.

#2. Teamwork — Lead the teamwork process with other functions in the organization to get more support for your own team. A simple act that will benefit the entire organization; get known as the person who championed the cause.
It’s unlikely that others will be willing to go the extra mile in this area; you’ll be recognized as someone who is breaking away and adding significant value to the organization.

#3. Relationships — Try to find a way to be the champion for relationship building both inside and outside the organization. Look specifically for how to engage with customers and bond them to your company.
Long term success requires intimate customer relationships and loyalty; create your own rules for doing this and teach your colleagues.
You will be substantially rewarded for this stepping-out act.

#4. Contrarian — Outside of the compliance zone defined by the organization, be audacious in doing the opposite of what you observe others doing.
Take leadership to eliminate boilerplate and copycat thinking and focus on innovating and creating new approaches to how the organization conducts business.

#5. Cravings — Gather people ‘cravings’: those deep innermost wants and desires people have but will tell only their most trusted partner. This can be practised with colleagues and ultimately with customers and partners.
This is an area you can easily breakaway from the traditional ‘needs based’ way most organizations do marketing.
Cravings not only pave the way to building loyalty, they also enable you to step away from the common ways others perform their roles.

#6. Report card — Introduce an internal report card; rate others on how well they support your organization.
This is an excellent way to enhance the support received from other functions in the organization and be innovative in improving the performance of the organization without being spotted as a non-conformer.

#7. Customer champion — Look for opportunities to step up to be the customer’s champion inside your organization. Be that person who does whatever it takes to get an issue resolved if it comes your way; shield the customer from the pain of having to deal with your bureaucracy, rules and policies.
Talk up and behave live THE customer advocate among the others in the herd around you.

You can be different in an environment that mandates compliance and sameness.

And you can be an effective agent in changing the culture of your organization from a copycat to a vibrant, innovative and creative one.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 8.29.22 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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August 1, 2022

7 proven ways to easily achieve operational excellence

Source: Unsplash

7 proven ways to easily achieve operational excellence.

What is operational excellence?

It’s usually defined by many such things as:
▪️Increased training and number of employees with key skills.
▪️Greater employee engagement.
▪️Reduced employee turnover.
▪️Enhanced accountability by individual team members.
▪️Improvement in cross-department cooperation.
▪️Higher employee satisfaction scores.
▪️Improved productivity.

And the list goes on to literally cover every operational tactic that organizations grapple with improving without providing a context and framework for deciding on the KEY tactics that, if successfully employed, will really drive operational EXCELLENCE rather than average operations.

It’s not that other operational tactics aren’t important, it’s that not all are of the SAME importance.

And for me, those that were critical to successfully implementing the strategic game plan of the organization ranked at the top of the tactical list.

My experience in leading businesses to achieve remarkable levels of performance has taught me that operational excellence is defined by how effectively the strategy of the organization is executed.

The organization’s operating model must be strategically relevant with operational efficiency running second.

It must drive strategic gains BEFORE efficiency improvements. It must seek efficiency only after it achieves strategic relevance.

These are 7 operational tactics I focused on to take a startup TO A BILLION IN SALES.

#1. The Strategic Game Plan (SGP) — The anchor for an operational plan is the strategy for the organization. It provides the overall context that drives the focus of every operational element.

Operations priorities must be led by the SGP otherwise dysfunction sets in.

If you can’t relate an operational activity to the SGP, question why you’re doing it.

#2. Line of sight — ‘Line of sight’ translation of the SGP is the tool I used to ensure that every operational function was directly in sync with the strategy of the organization.

The question is “What does the SGP specifically mean to (customer contact, recruitment, billing…)?

What activities, processes and systems for example need to be added in order to execute the SGP and what needs to be dropped because they are no longer related to the strategy?

Direct line of sight for every person in the organization translates into pristine strategy execution; unclear foggy notions of what the strategy means, on the other hand, results in dysfunction and little progress.

#3. A clean inside — Removing obstacles—Cutting the CRAP—that gets in the way of people doing their jobs is fundamental to a smooth and effective operations environment.

Administrative grunge must be eliminated and the policies and rules—dumb rules—that make no sense to cusomers must follow suit, or at least be changed to be as acceptable as they can.

As long as ‘the inside’ is needlessly complicated and messy, people get frustrated, they can’t do their job well and execution suffers with them.

#4. Serving leaders — Effective operations requires a leadership culture that has leaders in the workplace constantly asking people “How can I help?”.

This Leadership by Serving Around approach is critical to understanding what needs to change—point #3 above—to enhance how well the strategy of the organization is being executed.

#5. Strategy Hawk — Every strategy needs an owner—the Strategy Hawk—responsible to see that the strategy gets implemented in the way it is intended.

The Strategy Hawk is the ONE person who lives and dies by the success of the strategy which usually depends on a strong operational plan.

The Hawk’s role:
▪️constantly is ‘in the face’ of people in the organization keeping strategy execution alive.
▪️questions everything being done for strategic relevance.
▪️advises the CEO on what’s working and what’s not.
▪️hold regular operational review meetings to track progress on strategy execution.

#6. Goosebump recruits — Operational excellence requires the right people in the right positions as determined by the strategy.

And given that every strategy must include an element dealing with building customer loyalty, this means that people with a natural inclination to serve and care for other people must be the target of the recruitment process.

You can’t train people to like people.

You need to find them and hire them, and the process I use is simple: you ask the potential recruit to ‘tell you a story’ that would prove they ‘loved people’ and if their answer was rich and passionate enough to give you goosebumps you hire them straight away and teach them the other parts of the role they are aspiring to fulfil.

#7. A frontline culture — Cultural values that focus on supporting the frontline are a requisite to having an operational plan that is awesome at strategy execution.

Rather than thinking of them as low ranking, low skilled people ‘at the bottom’ of the organization chart, a frontline culture organization views them as the ‘objects of affection’, holding everyone accountable to discover how to make their jobs easier and to enable their effectiveness.

Any claim of operational brilliance without a ’living for the frontline’ organizational attitude is hollow and disingenuous at the very least.

Operational excellence isn’t an aspiration.

It’s the result of doing the hard operations work required to advance the organization’s strategy.

It’s a strategic concept not one that merely bundles together the populist notions of the day on operational effectiveness.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 8.1.22 at 05:44 am by Roy Osing
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