Business – A-Head for Success

Source of Stress: Failure

February 4, 2019

I doubt there is a person alive who enjoys the prospect or experience of failure. But for those who value success, failure is a necessary part of that journey.

A popular NLP concept is that ‘there is no failure, only feedback’. And Thomas Edison really understood this principle when he viewed his many attempts to create a commercially viable lightbulb not as failure but that he had found 10,000 ways in which it did not work.

What this shows is that success is a process. That you have to learn to get up when you fall down; learn from your mistakes; and have a relentless vision to keep you going.

Failure: a lesson from the famous

Any person who has failed in any endeavour will be in good company – other ‘failures’ include:

Steve Jobs who was fired from his own company;

Walt Disney who was fired for lack of imagination;

Oprah Winfrey who was demoted as a new anchor for being unfit for TV;

The Beatles who were rejected by Decca who didn’t like their sound and thought they had no future in show business;

Einstein who couldn’t speak until he was 4 and whose teachers said he wouldn’t amount to much;

Bill Gates, a dropout from Harvard, founded Traf-o-Data. The product had too many bugs and the company closed. He is now the richest man in the world;

Marilyn Monroe who was told by Colombia Pictures that she wasn’t pretty or talented enough to be an actress.

So, you see, failure is not an affliction. It doesn’t have to define you. It is your attitude to it that defines you. With all the people mentioned, they used it to spur them on. They learned from their mistakes so that they could improve, and improve some more. And improve again.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers describes the ‘10,000 hour rule’, emphasising that success is rarely by accident but rather by practice. Somehow, in this world of ‘instant fixes’ we have lost sight of the fact that anything worth having takes effort. And persistence. And the ability to not take things personally but rather to use every challenge on the ladder towards success, knowing that you will slide down the odd snake as you work your way up, only so that you develop resilience, resourcefulness and insights that will serve you well.

Failure: The Three Worst Things You Can Do

If you make a mistake, the three worst things you can do are:

Pretend it didn’t happen. Denial is no friend.
Take it personally. Blaming and shaming get in the way of learning and growing. Think of the difference between “I am a failure” and “It was a failure”. One is a about identity and the other is about process and results.
Give up. When you give up, you miss opportunities. Sometimes success us just around the corner. You also deny yourself the sense of achievement you can only get when you have worked hard to achieve something, navigated difficult waters, climbed a mountain or five, and made it. You don’t get that sense of achievement when everything is easy.

Failure and progress

Show me a person who has not failed at some point in their lives and I will show you someone who has not reached their potential or who has lived within the safe but entirely unexciting and unrewarding confines of their comfort zone.

If you would like more help in overcoming a fear of failure, or learning how to grow from failure, why not book a session? Get in touch here or call 0345 130 0854. You’ll be glad you did.

(C) Tricia Woolfrey 2019

Business, Stress, Success

Failure

Influence and Manipulation – What’s the Difference?

July 25, 2016

When they first start to work with me, some of my clients don’t like the idea of learning how to influence because they see it as the same as manipulation. But there is a significant difference. One that sets the influencer apart, builds trust and is a significant factor in helping you achieve your goals in life and in your business.

What is Influencing?

Influencing is the ability to have people buy into you, your idea, your business. It can smooth relationships so that they are more collaborative and harmonious, even in times of challenge. It requires the ability to understand the motivations of the other person, their hopes and fears, as well their objectives. This knowledge, through skilful influencing can help you achieve your own objectives with greater ease.

What is Manipulation?

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Business, Emotional Intelligence, Influencing

Business, Influencing, Manipulation

Enjoying More Flow – The Tempo

November 7, 2015

Which stress personlality are you? Welcome to the third in the series of how to enjoy more flow in your day to day life. What does this mean? When you are in your flow, you are motivated, energised, you are productive and everything seems easy to you. The key to enjoying this is to play to your strengths as much as you possibly can.

One way of understanding your strengths is to have a profile done. Talent Dynamics is one of several that I use and it has four main types. Today we will look at the third type – what is called The Tempo. But it isn’t the name that’s important, it’s the characteristics.

Of course at work it is rarely possible to have a job which only plays to your strengths. In reality, most people find that there are parts of their job that fits you so perfectly. It is far more likely that there are elements of your job that you dread, that may take a lot of mental energy and that take you longer to do than you think it should. But by doing a job which plays mostly to your strengths, and managing your time so your day is not affected too much by the other tasks, you will notice your productivity increases.

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Business, Performance, Productivity, Strengths

Flow, Performance, Productivity, Profile, Strengths

What’s the Difference Between a Coach, a Mentor and a Consultant?

April 14, 2014

Denial or Truth They say that all the best people get support to get them to the top and to keep them there. It is a sign of vision, strength, and drive to want to take your performance and productivity seriously enough to invest in yourself and your business in this way. But how do you know what kind of support you need?

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Customer Retention is Boring

February 20, 2014

customer retention I recently signed up for a very expensive service from someone who positions himself as an expert, no, THE expert in his field. I was given a lot of promises which made the large investment a no-brainer.

I have pretty high standards and, over the years, I have learned to lower them. And lower them some more. So, even with the hype, I wasn’t expecting everything which was offered to the degree it was positioned.

However, after a possible 20% delivery and 80% disappointment, and having given said-company ample time to catch up with themselves, I was told they were too busy to deal with it. They had new customers to deal with. New customers are EXCITING. Problems are boring – or so they believe. He is operating the customer churn and burn strategy.

This individual is pretty charismatic. He is good at winning new business. However, his reputation is being tarnished because he is good at customer attraction and very poor at customer retention. Given that keeping a customer is less expensive than attracting a new customer. And that there are only so many customers in the world, no matter how charismatic you are, looking at how to keep the ones you have is an important part of your business strategy.

Brand management and reputation management are key to this. So, a couple of questions for you:

Do you have a customer retention strategy?
How effective is your customer retention?
What would your customers say about you if you weren’t in the room?
What would your customers say are your most redeeming qualities?
What would your customers say is most frustrating in dealing with your company?

Here are some of the customer retention strategies I teach my clients:

Make sure your systems make it easy for them to do business with you
Offer only quality service and quality products
Have a quick turnaround on queries
Be easy to get hold of
Acknowledge every communication
Treat existing customers with as much care as you do prospects, if not more so
Under-promise and over-deliver – this on its own will set you apart from the competition
Stay in touch

Your customers will forgive you a lot of you care about them.

Tricia Woolfrey is an integrative business coach helping people like you and companies like yours perform at their best, so that you can be more profitable, with less stress and with your integrity intact. Call 0845 130 0854 for a free telephone consultation.

Business, Business Coach, Customer Service

Business, Customer retention, Customer service, Success, Tricia Woolfrey

A-Z of Business: Z- ZEN – Can Mindfulness be Profitable?

January 4, 2014

Mindfulness in Business When I started out in business in 1998, success to me was the achievement of a particular goal, be it profit-related, the completion of a project or the acceptance of an idea. And while these are true, they are concerned with the what of success, not the how.

Over the years, I have studied many psychological and business-school concepts. And what is missing for most people is the application of zen principles to business.

For the purpose of this article, the term zen can be considered as the mindful engagement with your work and operation of your business (or your job if you work for someone else). This means being purpose-ful about what you are doing and why, from a macro perspective and a micro perspective.

So, to begin with, why do you do what you do? What purpose does your business (or job) fulfil? I am reminded of an old parable about a man who visited a city many hundreds of years ago. He came across two men labouring under the noonday sun. He asked the first what he is doing “Oh, I am just doing some labouring. It is hard work and I will not be finished for hours.” He asked the same question to the second man who responded “I am helping to build a cathedral”. This story beautifully describes the purpose of their work. One saw it is a job, a means to an end, something he had to endure each day. The second man saw it as a vocation and put his heart and soul into each stone he laid. Which man was likely to have been more productive? Which man happier? Which would have inspired others? And which went home with a sense of achievement?

Are you clear about what your business is there to achieve in terms of a higher purpose? If you are in business purely for money, as a lot of people are, what is the higher purpose that money is there to achieve? For example, let’s take a cleaning company. Not the most glamorous of businesses and fraught with day to day problems. It would be easy to get bogged down in the nitty gritty of the issues around difficult customers and unreliable staff. So, what is the higher purpose? This would be personal to everybody but it may be to provide a beautiful environment for your clients to live or work. Or it may be to provide work and career opportunities for employees who have had difficulty holding down a job in the past. Or, if you really have no passion for the work at all, it may be to provide a good education for your children so that they can be free to make more fulfilling career and life choices for themselves.

When you have an over-riding purpose, it can carry you through the most challenging of times. It can pull you out of the mire of the day to day and into a higher, more creative, more empowered mindset. Which is likely to create more profit for you?

At a micro level, it is about being purpose-ful in the moment. This means applying yourself 100% to whatever it is you are doing, fully absorbed. The ability to multi-task is seen as a skill and even a virtue. It is something I have been proud to call a skill. And it is. But it is also a weakness. I noticed myself yesterday doing something and then stopping it to start something else and then interrupting myself doing that to do yet something else. I realised that I have become so “skilled” at multi-tasking and responding to requests and interruptions that I now interrupt myself! So I have to remind myself and, when I do, there is a flow to my work. A peacefulness, a quiet productivity which is enriching and rewarding. Of course there are times when I have to multi-task and over the years of my career I have had to do this thousands of times, shifting gear at a moment’s notice, which is why it is a difficult habit to break. However, the effort of stopping and starting and stopping and starting again reduces productivity and increases stress. It is important to be able to do it but not to make it a way of life.

True multi-tasking is a myth as usually you are simply stopping and starting, picking up and putting down. I recently saw a cartoon about women being great multi-taskers. It showed a woman flying through the air with a duster in one hand to clean the ceilings and pushing a vacuum with the other to clean the floors. But in reality it is really very difficult to apply yourself fully to more than one task at once. Sure you can wait on the phone for someone to pick up while you file something away but in reality, you are almost always only doing one thing at once. Doing that one thing with a sense of purpose can bring a richness to the most mundane of tasks. Most people hate filing but if you do your filing with an intention to create order in your environment this can transform the experience and it can even feel meditative. In addition, thinking about the piece of work that paper represents with an attitude of gratitude and appreciation can be equally rewarding. Certainly better than attacking the filing with a feeling of resentment and obligation.

So, the concept of applying yourself 100% to whatever you are doing in the moment, thinking about the purpose of that task, brings with it a higher level of clarity and productivity, a calmer demeanour and a much nicer person to take home to the family! This brings with it greater financial profit but also an intrinsic profit which is priceless.

And last, but by no means least remember the principles of karma – that you reap what you sow. So, be kind in your interactions and you will be richly rewarded with deeper and more trusting relationships as well as greater loyalty with your associates, your employees and your clients.

If you would like to learn more about how mindfulness can enhance your productivity and your profits, call me on 0845 130 0854.

On this note we end my A-Z of Business blogs, which I hope have been productive for you. As we enter the new year, I hope that your 2014 business plans are clear – your company goals, business values, products and USP…and that you feel personally prepared to take on the year ahead, manage your time effectively, serve your customers and motivate your staff. For any additional support, do contact me at tricia@pw-consulting.co.uk. I wish you a very happy new year and a successful 2014!

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

Business, Goals, Performance, Personal Development, Success

Mindfulness, Multi tasking, Productivity, Purpose, Success

A-Z of Business: Y – YOU – Are you the Problem or the Solution?

December 5, 2013

You and your business Whether you are in business for yourself or working for others, it is natural in times of success to take credit for it. But it’s tempting to blame external factors (other people, customers, the economy, market forces, etc) when things go wrong.

However, to do so is no help at all except that it massages a fragile ego. You are still stuck. The mark of a successful business-person is one who looks to themselves in times of challenge. In this way, they retain control rather give away their power to outside forces. To avoid looking to what you could do differently is to be a victim, powerless to make changes. In this competitive world, it is unsustainable. The power is in the ability to evolve.

All it takes is a different perspective. Look to yourself for the solution and ask yourself the right questions:

What factors have contributed to this problem?
In what way(s) have I contributed to this problem?
Where did I take my eye off the ball?
What didn’t I do which I should have done?
What did I do which I shouldn’t have done?
What didn’t I do which I could have done?
What steps can I take now which can remedy the situation?
What steps can I take to avoid this happening in the future?
Is this part of a bigger pattern?
What else can I learn from this?

By putting yourself “at cause”, you take control, you evolve and you build a more robust business. It takes courage, insight and humility. Do you have what it takes?

It can be difficult doing this for yourself and this is where a good coach/mentor can really help. Why not book a session now? Call me on 0845 130 0854 to find out more. You’ll be glad you did!

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

Business, Performance, Problem Solving, Strengths

Business, Business coaching, Challenge, Problem solving, Success

A-Z of Business: X- X-Ray Vision – Know your Business Inside Out

November 13, 2013

Your business results don’t reflect the effort you put in. Sound familiar?

If so, you are not alone. Indeed, some of my clients have been working so hard that they are nearing burnout. This is often because they are focusing on the wrong thing, which they believe to be the right thing. This is why having a forensic view of your company – x-ray vision – helps you to focus on those factors which make the biggest difference to your success. Working smart, not working hard is the difference which makes the difference. Productivity, not activity.

For example, if you are spending a lot of time bringing in new business but haemorrhaging customers out the back door, your efforts will be as effective as attempting to fix a burst pipe with a sticking plaster.

Or perhaps you are spending your time bringing in new business that you don’t have the infrastructure to support? Like building a house without it’s foundations.

Maybe your customer service is poor and you are busy sending out feedback forms when really the problem is that your hiring processes and training do not enforce your company value of customer satisfaction?

Or is your business booming but your customer’s aren’t paying their invoices? This is where success leads to ruin.

So, x-ray vision on the essentials helps you work strategically – making the right decisions about how you spend your time and your money and what will be the best strategy to take your business forward. The first step is to get yourself some key performance indicators. These help you to measure your performance against target on areas you consider to be important, for example:

Turnover
Profit
Product revenues
Sales growth
Cost of sales
Costs
Performance against budget
Sales conversion ratio
New sales by marketing method
ROI (see individual blog about this)
Revenue by customer
Employee satisfaction
Employee performance
Revenue by employee
Customer satisfaction
Customer complaints
Customer complaints resolved
There are also various KPIs for:
- Social media
- Site engine optimisation
- Call centre performance

Lies and statistics

A lot of clients view a nice big turnover as proof of their success and they just work very hard at increasing that number. However, a forensic examination of the statistics will let them know whether there is also a healthy profit because if the ratio of profit to turnover is low, you are working hard for little reward. It will help you look at what is creating the biggest profit and whether you need to make a loss on something to bring in profit on something else. This is both an art and a science. Also, if you are producing lots of nice big invoices but not getting paid because your credit control is not effective, that turnover is meaningless.

Here are my 5 steps to help you take control of your business with x-ray vision:

Consider what KPIs you want in your business (the above are just a few examples)
Regularly review performance against these
Look at the relationship between them
Decide what is causing the positive results and do more of those
Determine what is causing negative results and take remedial action. Make sure there will not be negative consequences elsewhere.

Remember that an x-ray shows you what is wrong structurally, it is up to you to find out the cause and to take appropriate action.

If you need help with any of this – it is hard doing it for yourself – do give me a call on 0845 130 0854. I look forward to hearing from you!

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

Business, Customer Service, Finance, Productivity, Profit, Sales, Success

Customer service, Employees, KPIs, Profit, Results, Revenue, Sales, Success

A-Z of Business: W: Weaknesses – You are only as strong as your weakest link

October 16, 2013

We are all made up of strengths and weaknesses, undiscovered potential and blind spots. Your best strategy for success is to exploit your strengths, uncover hidden skills (we all have them), open your eyes to your blind spots (we all have those too) and start working on these – and your weaknesses – to make sure they do not become your derailers.

Your biggest enemy in addressing any limitations is denial. If you want to have success, your best friend is your willingness to be open to discovering weaknesses and to work on them.

As the title of this article suggests – you are only as strong as your weakest link. Doing whatever it takes to mitigate against these is good insurance for the future and it will give you a sense of progress and achievement too. It may mean working on yourself (it’s much easier with the support of a good coach) or hiring in talent to make up for any shortfall. All the best teams, according to the principles of Belbin Team Roles require a variety of attributes to achieve success.

Belbin has nine team roles from Shaper (takes the business forward, creating strategy) to Completer Finisher (who puts the strategy into action). One cannot exist fruitfully without the others, otherwise the team is out of balance. Whether you are working on your own or with a team, the same principle applies.

In the 5 Pillars of Success, I look at the dimensions which help to make you successful:

1.    Clarity
Do you have a clarity of purpose, of mission and of values? Do you have a clear strategy with clear steps to take you there? Can you see clearly enough to prioritise well and delegate effectively to your team or brief your suppliers effectively? 2.    Skills
Do you have the skills you need to make you successful? Influencing? Time management? Leadership? Delegating? Presenting? Emotional intelligence? Business skills? Conflict management? What skill do you wish you had more of? What skill do you overplay so that it becomes a problem? Perfectionism? Drive? It’s just as important to see when a strength becomes a weakness as it is to recognise your blind spots. 3.    Mindset
Are you positive, motivated and solution oriented? Do you possess the personality factors for success? Have you been on my Personality for Success seminar yet? This gives you a great self-assessment tool, or you can book yourself a psychometric profile. 4.    Stress Resilience
Are you calm and resourceful under pressure? Do you respond thoughtfully to situations rather than react impulsively, building up more problems for yourself down the line? Do you allow the small things to become big things? Do you take the stresses at work home with you and the stress at home to work with you? 5.    Energy
Do you have too much work at the end of your energy? Does your lifestyle or pace impact your health? Do you have adrenal energy or core energy? It is only core energy which is sustainable but few people have this. Are you firing on all cylinders? If you aren’t, nor is your business.

And what weaknesses are there in your business? Do you have the skills, processes and systems in place to run the business effectively and profitably? Do you have a good quality team, performing well and working well together? Are you able to acquire and retain customers who pay well and are happy with your service or product? And are you able to meet your financial targets and obligations?

Remember that no one person can know it all, do it all and be it all. Perfection is not a human condition but it is a destination, one you can travel on your journey of self-development and business improvement.

What one area could you improve which would have the biggest impact for you? If you focus on one thing at a time then you will not risk dropping any of the many balls you are juggling and it is easier to integrate the change.

Why not book an assessment to see where you can best focus your efforts to create the best value? Call me on 0845 130 0854 to discuss your options.

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

Business, Coaching, Emotional Intelligence, Leadership, Performance, Personal Development, Strengths, Success

Emotional intelligence, Energy, Performance, Profit, Psychometric profiling, Skills, Strengths, Stress, Weaknesses

A-Z of Business: V – Values – Your Guiding Principles

October 2, 2013

You may think of value as being the value you provide to your clients. This, of course, is important. After all, if you are not providing value to your clients (or customers), why should they work with you? The value of your product and service needs to be clear and tangible to them if you are to have a sustainable business.

However, just as important are the values which drive you in your business. Values are what you consider to be important. They link into your vision, your mission and your strategy. They are your guiding principles.

Values are also part of your brand – the personality of your organisation.

As well as guide you, they can be a barometer in decision making. Let me take an example. Let’s say your values are:

Quality
Teamwork
Integrity
Customer delight
Innovation

If there is an opportunity to buy into a joint venture which stacks up financially with a quick and generous return on investment, but the quality of the offering is lower than your current product or service offering, this will undermine your values of quality, customer delight and possibly integrity. So, while on paper the deal may appear lucrative, the net effect is likely to be negative as people stop trusting your brand and you lose customer loyalty. If you lose customer loyalty, this will, in turn, impact your revenues. Remember it is more cost effective to keep an existing customer than it is to attract a new one.

But more important than that is your reputation. Working counter to your values undermines your brand and your brand values become different to your espoused values. They become your reputation – what people are saying about your company when you are not in the room. It is important to really understand the values which underpin your business. So, here are some questions for you:

What is important to your business? Truly? (This is no time for self-deception)
What do you want your clients and customers to be saying?
How is this different to what you imagine them to be saying now?
Are your values supported in your decision-making processes?
Your marketing?
Your logo?
Your website?
Your communications?

Remember that everybody in your organisation is an ambassador for your business (for good or ill), so it is important that they buy into your values with their own behaviours and attitudes. To what degree are your values reflected in the following:

Your hiring processes?
Your hiring decisions?
Your inductions?
Your training?
In your leadership style (and that of your other managers)?
In how you the performance of your staff is managed?

Perhaps your lived values are different from the values you would like to be known by? If so, it is possible to change them. However, it requires a structured and integrative approach. They need to weave into everything and to underpin everything with buy-in from each and every member of your staff – otherwise it is just a PR exercise which will backfire. Getting this right can create more customer loyalty, more employee satisfaction and attract new business to you.
© Tricia Woolfrey 2013

About Tricia Woolfrey – click HERE to find out about the author.

Branding, Business, Customer, Customer Service, Image, Performance, Strengths, Values

Business, Integrity, Performance, Strategy, Values