Rob's Blog: Operations & Productivity

Like most business owners, I often feel like I spend at least half my day dealing with e-mail. For our February issue, we asked our readers to give us their best tips for taking control of your email, before it controls you. Here are some of my favorites. “I limit times I check email. Ideally I check in twice per day, 11am and 4pm. After I check my email, I prioritize the action I will take with each email into one of five categories: urgent (address immediately); critical (respond within 24 hours); strategic issue (requires research, planning, or meeting, respond when information is prepared); irrelevant (discard). Everything else is categorized as delegate. I forward those emails to my assistant, who responds or forwards as required, takes the necessary action, and advises me of the results. I have created email folders for each category so that I can control my time and my schedule, stay focused on what’s important rather than being distracted by what shows up in my inbox, and spend the majority of my thinking and acting on strategic goals and business initiatives.” —Rita F. Weiss, president, Pinnacle Consulting Services, Mt. Kisco, NY “I have created dozens of sub-folders within my Outlook inbox. I then use Outlook’s rules and alerts tools, which precipitates an action to be taken on each incoming email based on whether it meets the rule criteria. For example, if you subscribe to a newsletter that is informative, but not time sensitive, a rule can be created to automatically place all emails from that source into a specific subfolder. Those emails can be reviewed at a later time. In addition, alerts can be set up to display a pop-up notification and sound for emails that are received from priority senders or messages that contain defined key words in the subject line. This assists with easily identifying priority messages.” —Mark J. Marino, Director, Emergency Management, MediSys Health Network, Jamaica, NY “Many of my clients who believed I was available 24/7 (mainly because I use a BlackBerry), soon realized that I only respond back to issues during normal business hours (9 to 5). I use the “Do not send before” tool in Outlook to delay the message send until business hours the following day. An example of how this works involves a client of mine who would e-mail me at all hours of the day and night. Early in our business relationship, if I saw a message he sent me at 11pm, I would respond immediately because I wanted to excel in customer service. Today, when he e-mails me, he knows not to expect an immediate response if his e-mail was sent after hours. By implementing this idea, I have greatly reduced the amount of time that work eats into my personal life and have grown my company's reputation at the same time.” —Joseph Glass, president, Credit Cards NJ, Teaneck, NJ

Here's something that may save you and your employees a lot of hassle during your commute. The MTA just released an alert system that sends emergency service notifications directly to your email or phone (as a text message). You can get alerts for all subways, buses and commuter rail lines, as well as traffic alerts for MTA bridges and tunnels. It's free to sign up and you can have the alerts sent to as many emails and phone numbers as you'd like, but keep in mind that text message charges from your provider still apply. Sign up for the free alerts here. Now you'll know if those "subway and bus" excuses you get from your staff are really true! P.S. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Feeling down? Don't know where to turn? Worried about the economy? Read a book. There is no shortage of things to worry about these days (e.g. finding new employees, working tough sales environments, inflation and etc) and it is easy to get bad tunnel vision – which could lead to negative thinking. Whenever I start to feel like the glass is half-empty, I know that I need to be more positive. Otherwise I start to make decisions that are based on playing scared. So I just pick up a good business book. It might be on strategy, sales, HR, whatever. I usually get a few good ideas in a few chapters and then poof... I start to get energized and start seeing the glass as half-full again. Keep the following in mind:

• If you’re not sure what to read, go to Amazon and type in a few key words and pick out a book that has a lot of positive reader comments. Another option is going to the bookstore and checking out what is under the cover.
• This is not a substitute for addressing problems. I am not advocating you spend all day reading. Just that you allocate some time to read, either before or after your day.
• Take notes on specific ideas that are pertinent to your company. Then, re-read those ideas when you are done. Next step? Implement them!

Feel better yet?

The other day I had a chance to speak with the former president of Hearst Magazine Division (among other titles), Gil Maurer. From all of his years in the cut-throat magazine industry, one lasting lesson he took away was the value of speed - measuring, revising, and executing with as much velocity as possible. What does that mean? Well, to put it in Gil’s own words: “By emphasizing and achieving organizational speed we will beat our competitors with increasing frequency. We will bring more successful products to market; we will invest less money in doing so because we will identify our losers more quickly. Our margins will improve and morale across the entire organization will improve along with it.” He also spoke about the importance of making numerous smaller decisions, which are easier to manage, rather then rolling everything up into one large decision. “Five small steps, achieved with speed, even if the second or the third are flawed and must be abandoned, will get you a great deal further than waiting for one large failure. Learn your mistakes fast and early and get them behind you.” Check out the picture in this post for an artist’s visual representation of what Gil’s talking about. It’s a picture he actually had in his office while at Hearst Magazine. Click here for more advice from Gil. It pertains to the magazine industry, but I think anyone can gain something from his words.

I just sat in on the tail end of a presentation from Gail Nikol, President of Unique Business Solutions (www.ubsassociates.com) who spoke about the importance of documenting all of your processes and procedures. As many business owners already know, a procedure guide or standard operating procedure (SOP) manual, can help in so many ways- like when an employee leaves the company or simply goes on vacation. The problem is, about 80% of the companies don't have the manual because it takes time and effort. Here are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting in Gail's presentation: - The importance of an employee exit checklist. Things like changing passwords could have huge implications. - The only way you could ever get a project like this (creating a procedure guide) is with the help of your staff. Of course, some staff might think you are trying to get rid of them. To avoid this, tell all employees you will need their help (I can't imagine that your staff will think that everyone is getting fired).

I attended an event recently and the topic of discussion was ethics in business practices. The speaker for the event was Harvin C. Moore III, a once prominent executive in Houston who spent two years in jail for fraudulent deals he made during the Texas savings & loans crisis. Having learned from, and paid for his past mistakes, Harvin now does speaking engagements for executives on the topic of ethics in business. Here is Harvin's list of classic ways people try to rationalize illegal practices that I think all business owners should keep in mind (or, rather, not let in to your mind.) Harvin Moore's Top Ten Classic Rationalizations 10. It complies with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices.)9. They owe it to me.8. I wouldn't harm my own company.7. I didn't know about it. Well, if I did know about it, I didn't know it was wrong.6. There's no victim, no harm.5. No one will ever know.4. There's no personal gain.3. Everybody's doing it.2. I'll straighten it out later.1. I had to do it. Now ask yourself- have you ever needed to tell yourself any of the above before making a questionable decision?

In business school, we learned the term “switching costs”.  Switching costs are the costs that a customer incurs if they want to switch vendors.  The wireless phone companies have that $175 or so fee if you terminate early (which is not the best example because it mostly represents payback for some of their sunk costs).  The document storage business (as you might have read about in Norm Brodsky’s Street Smart columns), charge if you want to take a box out of storage.  Other switching costs are more subtle such as if you wanted to change to new software (I can’t imagine changing CRM systems would be an easy task). I had breakfast last week with a very successful career salesperson that used to work for Caterpillar in the 70s.  He told me that in addition to great service (see below), his company used to have an IT department that functioned as the IT department for their clients.  Remember back then it cost a lot of money to purchase mainframes etc.  Do you think that customers thought about that when deciding on trying to save $10,000 from another machinery supplier?  You bet. Another switching costs is the degree of ease to do business with your company as well as great customer service.  Unfortunately, that cost is one that many clients don’t appreciate until they leave you and experience poor service. So next step is to give some thought about switching costs you can establish in your business.  Maybe it is the ability to get tough requests done or maybe it is some “added value” that you provided that is appreciated.  Just be careful to make it subtle and not something that might turn customers away