If you seek

sales fireworks,

check your sparklers!

     Business owners constantly want more sales results than they’re typically ready to put their shoulders to the wheel for, in terms of the marketing words (their “sparklers”) that they’re using.

     The average response to meeting the need for coming up with the right sets of words to represent business products, services, and ideas is a lazy one. Either wing it, delegate it, or hire some fancy high-priced group of self-proclaimed experts.

     None of these work.

     When you wing it, it’s like not fastening the screws that hold your product parts together, or not providing the terms of the services you offer.

     You are not in business doing what you’re doing to be a great marketing writer any more than you’re in business to be a great lawyer or accountant (unless of course your business is a law or accounting practice!).

     So why waste time and energy (and ultimately money) trying to be something you’re not, when you have the option to be driving your business to a successful destination?

     Okay, so you won’t wing it; you’ll hand it off to that assistant instead . . . someone who’s always writing some book, or poetry, or funny Facebook posts. When you delegate the task, regardless of what you think might be signs of talent rising up from someone on your staff, you should expect to get the inadequate results you get.

     I can assure you after seeing hundreds of these dynamics, what you get back will simply not be professional enough a representation of your business strengths put into the customer benefits language needed to succeed at producing the sales results you seek. What you get, in fact, could very well end up undermining your other sales-building efforts.

     When you hire a fancy group — advertising or marketing or PR agency — you are probably playing about 85% odds that the group you hire will be very skilled at not letting you know that they are more preoccupied with winning themselves some type of marketing, advertising or PR award than they are with helping you make sales.

     When “getting sales” is what’s important, being “pretty” and having the best designs don’t always count for much.

     Odds are also that they will be fantastically talented at not letting on that they don’t really know how to help you make sales. Ask them if they’re willing to work on a expenses plus performance incentive basis. That question usually separates reality from fantasy.

     If the words you’re using don’t sparkle enough to spark action, find a wordsmith. Do some homework and scout around for an experienced individual who has a proven track-record in writing words that get sales results for clients.     

     You need fireworks? Start with someone who knows how to spark sales with sparkler words . . . words that attract attention, words that create interest, words that stimulate desire, words that bring about action, words that prompt satisfaction.

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You and America and Our Troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

Bleak prospects, but . . . 

Healthcare viability

needs hospitals to

 be re-invented

     Like a rotting apple in the middle of a basketful, poor management skills can breed themselves into a virtual (and often literal) sea of incompetency before anyone realizes they’ve been overtaken by dumb and dumber, suffering damage that’s too late to reverse.

     DOCTOR BUSINESS is a book I wrote fifteen years ago after more than twenty years of healthcare management consulting experience. It extolled the virtues of entrepreneurial thinking and business management techniques as essential to successful medical practice development.

     The dynamics and principles of that book still apply today, but — with hindsight — I can now see that I failed to recognize the ever-building tsunami of hospital administration ineptness which was emerging and gathering force at the time.  

     Power-crazed hospitals  — rather then entrepreneurially adapt themselves to technology and market-place changes, and do a better job of running their own businesses —  have instead stuck their noses into commandeering business-unsavvy physician partnerships and professional associations.

     Doctors who lack business sense have been buying into hospital physician relations programs that infiltrate and end up controlling their practices. In the process, many of these business ability-shy hospitals have effectively choked off all prospects for medical practices to function as viable business entities.

     Compounding the antics of small-minded hospital muckity-mucks, the new Obamacare health system will have the same kind of disastrous financial and healthcare environment impact as the millions of gallons of oil that continue leaking into our planet’s seas.

     It’s hard, nearly impossible, to excel as any kind of business manager when what it is that you’re managing comes under the scrutiny and control of a bigger, less capable entity that’s operating at cross purposes with your pursuits and interests.

     For more than the past two decades, many hospitals have been being run by groups of administrators whose sole qualifications are typically that they are or were wannabe physicians. Many are med school or government or academia dropouts.

     Some have MBA and MS degrees tucked in their pockets, but it’s my best guess that the vast majority have no meaningful small business experience or sense of reality.

     Wielding limited skill-sets, these people continue to assume controlling positions with running the business affairs of medical practices without having any solid small business management experience or expertise.

     The result, not unlike most government programs, is frequent failure.

     I have had up-close-and-personal vantage points to witness half a dozen hospital failures (and am presently watching another in the making) and the demise of a dozen physician-run medical practices at the hands of intrusive hospital controls.

     Medical practices are small businesses. They need to be run like small businesses in order to survive and thrive. It’s in the best interests of all Americans that this happen.

    But birthing a competitive free market healthcare system doesn’t mean clamping down on medical practices or trying to consolidate all insurance entities under a government umbrella, or having politicians control physician and treatment choices.

     It does mean doctors need to learn more about business and accept that role, and it does mean that hospital administrators need to back off trying to manipulate affiliated practices and start driving more energy into re-inventing themselves to ride marketplace changes more effectively, and anticipate those to come.  

302.933.0116   Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals!

God Bless You and America and Our Troops. 

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Two Simple Examples:

“Do!” vs. “Say!” and

“How?” vs. “Why?”

     I’ll never forget the lesson I learned many years ago as a young college professor when I tried using a Gestalt Therapy “Empty Chair Role-Playing” technique with a disgruntled student in a business career development classroom.

     I used the wrong word. The angry student nearly injured at least two or three other students because I said “do” instead of “say.” 

     Facing an empty wooden chair I placed in front of him, I draped my jacket over the back and asked Tony, who was extremely annoyed with his boss, what he would do if his boss was in that jacket sitting in that chair facing him right now.

     Tony strode defiantly toward the empty chair, picked it up and flung it full force over the six rows of floor-divers and ducking heads, smashing it to smithereens against the back wall. Lucky for him (and for me) that no one was hurt.

     You’re the boss, right? Ask any employee WHY she or he was late to work or an appointment or meeting. What’s the response? Ask WHY some operational function broke down or WHY your best customer account had been gradually cutting back their orders while increasing competitive purchases. What are the responses you get?

     The word, “Why?” is a request for reasons. It is a set up for anyone to respond with excuses. Asking “Why?” will never solve a problem.

     The most current example of how this word mix-up fails, comes from a befuddled White House asking why the catastrophic Philadelphia train derailment happened, instead of taking a genuine leadership position and asking “HOW?” . . . “HOW can we fix it?” would certainly have been a better approach and accomplished more. Corrective actions speak louder than analytical investigations. 

     Yes, of course there’s a bit more to this last example. It would seem to most businesspeople rather inconceivable that anything as potentially disastrous as a derailment by a government-run railroad that resulted in at least 7 deaths and hundreds of injuries could be ignored for half a day, and even then, still be preoccupied with where to place blame instead of how to solve the problem.

     So, yes, timing is a critical ingredient in word choice, but difficulties often start and end with the exact words selected and used. Before you might jump to conclusions about some issue in your workspace, you may want to respond prudently instead of react in ways that simply make the situation worse.

     Pause long enough before speaking to consider how the recipient(s) might perceive the words you choose, as well as the integrity of your timing.

     These examples and this discussion are not far-fetched by any means. Imagine such vast differences (as between “do” and “say” or “how?” and “why?”) in word choices you use — or overlook or let slide —  in your advertising, marketing, promotion, public relations, customer service, sales presentation.

     Was it your grandfather who said “think first and speak second”?

   # # #

931,854,0474       Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. 

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Please excuse me

for not looking up,

but I am listening

carefully… BULL!

It’s the unconscious “game” we all play every day and most vehemently protest when we’re caught red-handed.

Some who recognize the fallibility of its practice at least have the courtesy to acknowledge the shortcoming at the same time that they practice it in your face. Others just play dumb when you call them at it.

Don’t let employees pretend they’re listening to you while they’re reading or writing or surfing the Net or watching TV, or –and here’s the biggy–  driving a car! It’s been proven conclusively time and again that the human mind simply cannot concentrate fully on two things at the exact same time. If the answer to your question, “Are you driving right now?” is “Yes,” set a call-back time and hang up!

Yes, concentration can alternate rapidly, but there are no double-barrel brainwave tunnels that facilitate thought process focus on more than one item, idea, situation, person or place at any given split second. 

You can’t do 2 things at the same time!

So what does this mean if you own and/or manage a business or part of a business? It means when there’s important information to share, you need to flat-out tell distracted employees — like many assertive classroom teachers tell students — that you will wait to speak until you have their full attention.

By the same token, you need to return the behavior by facing the person who’s serving as a news source to you. (No, not network TV news anchors; most of them deserve less attention than a bad car commercial)

It means you need to teach others around you — by example. It means you need to subtly demonstrate (preferably without making an issue of it) that good back and forth eye contact (not staring or glaring) enormously improves the accuracy of communication and also reinforces self-esteem.

It means you could do no greater service to the elimination of errors by consistently paraphrasing (repeating in your own words what you understand others to be saying, as a way to check accuracy points with them). “Do I understand you correctly to mean __________?” is a highly effective verbal tool for that.

It means that both you and the information source will benefit enormously in pursuing common goals and thought processes by asking for diagrams and examples.

Ask the speaker to stop or slow down until you can take notes. Not only will this force a more careful explanation, and help prevent errors, it’s also a flattering and ego-boosting technique.

Sure this all takes more time. Of course it’s more effort. But the results will launch your rocket quicker, safer, and more productively than those who trip over themselves rushing to light a fuse that may not even be connected.

 Just ask yourself if you want the job done right the first time. If the answer is yes, take the extra time and effort to communicate the who, what, when, where, why, and how.    

302.933.0116    Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. 

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Ask Any Writer . . .

“That honorable stop.”

– Shakespeare

“Leaving a few things

unsaid.”

– Elbert Hubbard

     Call it what you like, but having a mature sense of judgment, restraint, prudence, or tact is one of the world’s greatest measures of effective leadership.

     On a day when world news hovers over a General and a President who both apparently lack this quality, we are once again left to our own devices for finding leadership examples in our own businesses and industries and professions.

     We are bombarded today by many “progressive-minded” management gurus, trainers, coaches, consultants and self-proclaimed “evangelists,” with the need to practice “Leadership Transparency.”

     The notion is being hard-sell marketed that business owners and managers must emulate the open-door characteristics of Leadership Transparency in order to make a difference in this world.

     Advocates also suggest that the word, “transparency,” and transparent actions, need to take the high road of fostering full time open-and-above-boardedness.

     Yet it’s no secret that moderation in the form of exercising discretion will almost always cut us out a better, more productive, less hurtful path to take, than one that is completely and 100% clear.

Being able to see through leadership

can often limit its very ability

to produce meaningful results.

     It’s an instinctive behavior unique to human beings (and especially to all of us “Men Are From Mars” types) to indulge in analytical pursuits at literally every turn in the road.

     When management leaders spill their guts (beans? milk?) and put everything out on the table, they leave no room for analyzing alternatives. Analyzing alternatives paves the way to innovative thinking.

     Economic growth comes from watering and fertilizing and casting sunshine onto innovative thinking.

     One need not be a brain surgeon to qualify for having the awareness that businesses that nurture and encourage innovative thinking are those that survive and thrive. Those that don’t, don’t.

     Leadership effectiveness is dependent on the ability to motivate. Motivating others requires the right mix of challenges and opportunities. How challenging is it to provide complete access to clear open-door directions? Is that action dishing up an opportunity or quietly investing in the status quo?

     Exercising discretion amounts to holding back a little . . . giving followers their own openings, providing the chances to innovate and excel.

     Nobody said leadership was easy, but do we really think we’ll have booming success stories on our hands when we encourage everyone we work with both inside and outside our businesses to know everything that’s going on all the time?  

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless:  You, America, and Our Troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

It used to be:

“Do this, Do that!”

But today’s leaders 

teach by example,

  so it’s: “Here’s how!”

     Leaders –true leaders– may or may not embrace the whole transparency theme that’s wormed its way into the management apple over the past couple of years, but one thing’s for sure: they are leading others by teaching and they are teaching by giving and being and using examples. “Here, let me show you how to do that in a way that will save you more time” are words that work wonders.

     “Why don’t we stop this meeting right here, order lunch in for everybody, and let’s see if we can all tackle this problem that’s surfaced? We can start by each of us writing down three possible solutions in the next three minutes without any discussion. Then we’ll . . .” Almost makes you want to be in that meeting, doesn’t it?

     Leadership is best delivered with quiet assertiveness, back-pat coaching and extreme simplicity. I call the words we use to motivate others most effectively: LEADERSHIPLICITY. I’ve never met anyone who had trouble getting their arms around a challenge or opportunity that was labeled 1-2-3 or A-B-C.

     We humans seem to have an acceptance fixation on groups of three steps, three items, three bullet points, three ways. 1-2-3 and A-B-C are simple. Life is complicated. 1-2-3 and A-B-C make things simple. Anytime we can reduce a seemingly complex problem or how-to directions into three chunks, we produce and get better results.     

     Now, there are probably as many alternative number choices as there are people on the planet, and there are most certainly some very strong-willed advocates out there who are willing to bet the farm on the number 7. Hmmm, 7? Well sure there are Steven Covey’s 7 Habits, 7/11 stores, Mickey Mantle’s shirt, the 7 Dwarfs, and 7 days in a week. 7 works.

     But 7 is an advertising copywriter’s sales tool. People BUY 7. Seven reasons are usually enough to justify any purchase. But 3 is the number that prompts action. Anyone will take three easy steps; most of us will balk if asked to DO seven things. Oh, are you kidding? 7 bullet points? Who wants to read all that? Seven ACTS? As in A-B-C-D-E-F and G? That’s a lot of stuff to do. You’re going to lose me after C or D.

     LEADERSHIPLICITY means making a daily commitment to eliminate the complicated and accentuate the simplicated. If your grandparents wouldn’t understand the word, don’t use it! How hard is that? Why care? Because effective leadership depends exclusively on the leader’s ability to communicate.

     Fancy words get in the way. They don’t impress others; they frustrate others. Nobody wants to be checking their thesaurus every time you have something to say. 

www.TWWsells.com or call 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You! God Bless America, and God Bless Our Troops “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

SOMETIMES YOU FEEL

LIKE A SCHLUNK,

SOMETIMES YOU DON’T!

It’s what you DO with bad feelings that counts!

     It doesn’t matter who you are, how great your reputation, how elevated your life-position, or how religious or nutrition-conscious you behave. Nor does it matter how physically fit, mentally alert, or in love with the world you may be.

     You will have bad days in life (and groups of bad days) when you feel like a schlunk because you screwed-up a business or personal relationship or situation.

     The thing is that many times the wheels come off, or the bottom falls out, or the roof caves in. . . accidentally. And sometimes, uh, maybe accidentally-on-purpose.

     But getting straightened out and back on track, demands concerted effort, intended purpose, and proactive pursuit. Recovery is never accidental. It requires conscious awareness that behavior is a choice.

     It also requires a plan. The most effective plans are those wrapped around the military OST management model:

OBJECTIVE/STRATEGY/TACTICS

Your “OBJECTIVE” is your goal. To be effective it needs to adhere to ALL of the following 5 criteria:

• Specific

• Flexible

• Realistic

• Due-Dated

• In Writing

     This applies to both business and personal goal-setting. Without all five, it’s merely a wish (and, with apologies to Tinkerbell and The Wizard of Oz, wishing does NOT make it so!)

     Your “STRATEGY” is your thinking avenue or approach to reaching or achieving your Objective or goal. It is the thought process part of your plan.

     Your “TACTICS” are the implementations or executions of your Strategies. They are the actual “do it” steps you take to initiate and maintain your plan. This is the point of bringing about action.

     If you’ve done this right, you’ll remember the goal criteria list includes “flexibility” which translates to being ready and able to choose to change directions or move objectives as situations and people require.

Most people fail at goal-setting and pursuit because they think goals are in concrete and that failure to reach them is too demeaning and discouraging. But keeping goals flexible means adjusting them and/or the circumstances to achieve them.

     The easy part is making it all work. The hard part is getting started. Getting started is a choice!

# # #

 931-854-0474    Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You!

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT Day for Someone !

Hey!

Ease up on the ears

a little, will ya please?

     Where is it written that business and professional sports success must hinge no longer on performance, but on the tumult and hoopla that surrounds them?

     How did it ever get to be that attending a professional football, basketball, or baseball game meant giving up one’s sense of hearing for a week?

     I am nor referring to the yeas, boos, chants, whistles, claps, and songs of enthusiastic well-meaning fans. With or without cheerleaders, those natural outbursts of energetic support — together with the crack of a bat, the swoosh of a net, and the thud of a tackle — are the real true sounds of sports.

     I’m talking about the machine-generated, artificial bombardments of drum-banging, hand-clapping, bugle-blowing, spiral-buzzing racket that has absolutely nothing to do with the sport-at-hand, nor the performers, and which is a genuinely disruptive insult to our respective brains.

     No I’m not turning into a grouchy, out-of-touch, old guy. I am simply resentful of how noise has risen to the top of the consciousness disruption charts, and literally taken over what it was originally designed to merely support.  

     I was reminded of this again today as I went to see my favorite NY Mets play the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards. I’m not singling out any team or stadium here because it’s ALL of them; today was simply an example.

     And just like in business— some know-it-all marketing whiz-kids have literally commandeered every professional, semi-pro and college stadium and gymnasium, and forced each venue into becoming a catch-all of suffocating, obnoxious, insulting, decibel-threatening sound effects.

     How stupid is sports top management to have been sold on the idea that blasting noise (and even, but to a less annoying extent, music) through seat-and-building vibrating speaker systems will contribute to successful team status?

     In fact, it seems to me to be doing the reverse. I see many more fans staying home to watch sports on TV and not subjecting themselves to this deafening fun for the feeble-minded.  

     In business, educational and entertaining market-ing approaches seem universally preferable to those parts of the population that I’m exposed to, than the screaming in-your-face, sleazy fast-talk of car dealership advertising and many late night info-mercials. Yet the audio clutter continues.

     Greedy pro sports management convictions that noise sells . . . and that the way to an enthusiast’s heart and wallet is by prompting pounding headaches . . . is serving to set the stage for other businesses to follow suit. Does it all originate in Hollywood? Well, let’s see: how many movies can you name that haven’t wrapped their messages in earth-shattering sounds? (Oh, sorry, “Special audio effects.”)

     No matter what your business message is and no matter how you say it, when you surround it with too much noise, you will suffer the consequences of lost trust and lost credibility. People who really mean what they have to say don’t need to wrap it up in fireworks, sirens, explosions, and other deafening audio garbage.

     Just say it like it is.

If a certain sound is part of what’s being sold or sets a receptive stage, use it.

If not, don’t.

www.TWWsells.com or call 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You! God Bless America, and God Bless Our Troops “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

Can we learn and use

more words that

are more simple?

     Could be that nobody’s getting our message, but maybe it’s because we’re just talking to ourselves?

     We need to educate ourselves to think and communicate in simpler terms. Fancy industrial and professional jargon gets us nowhere, except as the old expression goes, tangled up in our own underwear. Our central business messages must be so simple we could recite them to our grandparents and –in a flash– they would “get it.”

     We have to stop trying to impress people with how much we know, and start trying to explain how our product or service can provide them with the solutions and benefits they seek . . . in simple, easy-to-understand words and steps. Tossing off a string of tech talk when we’re not communicating with other geeks is an increasingly common happening. 

     Frankly, I’m convinced that even talking geek-talk to geeks is not necessarily the best way to go! Why? Because “GEEKS ARE PEOPLE TOO!”

     Do we trust a doctor who dumbfounds us with her anatomical references, or one who explains an ailment in ache-and-pain terms we can understand?

     This simplification process is something I call getting vocabulated (actually a word I stole from my inventive granddaughter — thank you, Talley — to use in this blog!). My meaning is to describe an attitude we all need to put into practice with our paid advertising and websites, and then remember not to then leave it (simplicity) standing alone outside the door of meeting and presentation rooms. 

     Do we just rely on public messages to carry simplistic terms, but get down on the heavy duty industry, trade and professional verbiage when we write an email or business plan or ebook or news release?

     Do we use “proximity” for “area”? Do we “mitigate” or “lessen” (or “ease”)? Are we in pursuit of “opulence” or “wealth” (or even more simply, “money”)? Does “SEO” get any simpler when we’re talking to a non-website person (roughly half the business population!) about “Search Engine Optimization”? How about just saying “Help to increase search window rankings”? 

     Are we perhaps afraid of peers looking down their noses (or critics looking over their glasses) at us if we use words that sound too childish? What’s “too childish” if what we have to say makes sense?

     Do we think underlings won’t be sufficiently impressed when we (again with a doctor example) tell a patient’s family that their son has a broken bone in his hand below his pinkie finger instead of informing the parents that he has a fractured fifth metacarpal? 

     When we’re talking with others in our industry and refer to “sustainable manufacturing processes,” we will no doubt be understood, but the general public (and probably 95% of our target markets) will not need to shake their heads in wonderment if instead we talk about “not using dangerous chemicals like lead and mercury to make our products.” 

     The simpler we can explain ourselves and the benefits of what we have to offer, the more others will gravitate toward us, and the more sales we’ll make. Now, there’re a couple of vocabulated goals. Y’think? 

www.TWWsells.com or call 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You! God Bless America, and God Bless Our Troops “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!