Bruce Eckfeldt 4/4/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 4/4/24

5 Common Cash Flow Mistakes That Can Slow Fast-Growth Companies

If you want to grow quickly and predictably, make sure you avoid these five cash flow challenges.

As a strategy and leadership coach, my job is to help businesses scale quickly. Most of my clients are doubling every one to two years, and some as quickly as six months. While this growth is fun and exciting, it can also be complicated and painful.

One of the more difficult and hard-to-see challenges of growth is managing cash flow. Just because sales are skyrocketing doesn't mean the bank account is. Knowing how to calculate profit, forecast sales and expenses, and identify areas of profitability versus areas of limited growth is crucial in making key business decisions.

Scale puts a lot of pressure on systems and people; sometimes to a breaking point. I've seen companies take a $10 million business that's running at 22 percent profit and grow it to a $25 million business running at a 5 percent profit and lose money when they factor in expansion and capital costs. As any private equity analyst would tell you, growth that doesn't also increase the net margin isn't worth the investment.

Here are five factors that will impact your margin and growth calculations that will impact your profitability and cash flow.

1. Costs of marketing and sales

When you're growing rapidly, things change quickly. How you market and sell your product or service when you're making just a few million in revenue could be quite different from when you're making $100 million. Developing new channels, competing in different markets, and running up against different competitors will all change your strategies and tactics, and these will likely change your investments and spending.

What might have been a high-margin line of business can quickly become unprofitable in later stages of growth. Being able to track and monitor these numbers is critical. Know how to associate marketing and sales costs with your different lines of business, track them as you grow, and ensure you're making good investments.

2. Getting paid on time

Customers can't pay you if you don't send them accurate invoices on a timely basis. I've seen companies get so caught up in selling in a hot market that they drop the ball on accounting and build up huge accounts receivables. This will tie up a lot of working capital, but it also significantly increases risk to the business. When the music stops, it doesn't matter who owes who what; only those with cash survive.

3. Understanding your cash cycle

For most businesses, you have to invest in marketing and sales, raw materials, inventory, production, and delivery before you can invoice and get paid. These amounts and timing create a conversion cycle that consumes cash. If you don't understand this and forecast it well, you can quickly grow yourself broke. Sometimes even out of business.

While there are financing strategies for this, they are expensive and volatile. It's better to optimize your pricing, payment schedule, and delivery turnaround times to reduce the cash demands. In extreme cases, you can invert this cycle by requiring large upfront payments and pushing off expense payments. In these cases, growth creates cash and can become a virtuous cycle.

4. Calculating costs of capital

If you're a heavy manufacturing business that needs equipment and raw materials, you'll need cash to invest to fuel your growth. And relying on outside funding sources can quickly become expensive. Make sure you're calculating the real cost of capital and factor that into profitability both at a product line and overall business level. Otherwise, debt servicing payments can quickly gobble up any additional profit you make.

5. Expansion costs

With growth comes expansion, and for many companies, this requires non-trivial investments in facilities, equipment, inventory, staffing, and training. You need to factor in these costs and allocate them to your products and services appropriately. Often, lines of business will oscillate wildly as you grow into and out of big fixed costs like machinery and office space. Know what they are and how they impact growth costs and profitability.

Every company needs to grow. If you're not growing, you're shrinking. Understanding how your business engine works and knowing what it will consume resources as you grow is critical. If you're growing fast, you need to be a master at it. Getting these right can drive significant success. Getting them wrong can be painful, and if you're not careful, terminal.

Bruce Eckfeldt 3/28/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 3/28/24

The Best Leaders Focus on More Than Just Their Professional Success

To create a balanced life, you need a framework and a plan. Here are six areas to reflect on to create more balance.

Everyone talks about the importance of balance in life. But what does that really mean? Too often, we pay lip service to the idea without a plan or a framework for how to create it. Without a plan, things won't change, and without a framework, we can't make a plan.

When working with my executive clients, we focus on the following areas. We assess each and evaluate how it's currently going and where we need to make changes to create a healthier balance. While we don't always need to focus on the lowest scores, we want to understand where we need to make changes to address critical risks and priorities.

1. Personal development

First and foremost, healthy and balanced executives prioritize their personal development and self-care. This includes practical matters like regular health checkups and investing time and energy into personal interests and hobbies. While I don't expect the leaders I work with to be competing in Ironman triathlons, though several do, I do want to make sure they have some regular routines that keep them physically and mentally fit.

2. Immediate and extended family

I've seen too many executives, both men and women, get so wrapped up in advancing their business that they neglect their families. Not just partners and children but also siblings and extended family. While all families have drama and can be difficult, families are key to our support network and social connections. Making time for family will keep you balanced, reduce stress, and increase overall life satisfaction. Being busy with work is not an excuse for neglecting these important connections.

3. Friends and other relationships

I often challenge executives to name five close friends whom they could share anything with and who are not family members or connected to their business. Most fail. Some can't even name one or two. This is a problem, because family and business connections are too intertwined in your decisions and success, which means you're less likely to share significant challenges for fear of upsetting them, and they are less likely to give you honest, and sometimes difficult, feedback. True friends are a key resource for working through big issues because they only have your best interests at heart. They can give you some tough love if needed.

4. Professional development

This is more than just making more money. It's about charting your career beyond your current business or job and setting big goals that are meaningful and impactful for you. Knowing your larger ambitions allows you to make better short-term decisions that will nudge you toward the bigger picture. This also involves setting your professional development goals and determining what you need to add to your executive toolbox. Without a long-term plan, you'll, at best, wander around aimlessly, at worst, paint yourself into a corner.

5. Financial matters

Most executives I work with are highly motivated by money and building wealth. Assuming they are also striving to improve their relational connections and mental and physical wellness and positively impact their communities, then I'm all for it. The challenge is that being in a solid financial situation is more than making a lot of personal income. It's about protecting yourself and your family with insurance, building a reasonable savings and retirement account, and investing in assets that will provide you with future resources and opportunities. Unfortunately, many executives focus solely on making more income and not on building wealth and security.

6. Community and legacy

At some point, making more money and building an even bigger business becomes unfulfilling. Once you've taken care of your needs and provided for your family, you need to start thinking bigger about the impact you want to make on your community. Getting involved in social matters that you care about and can have an impact on becomes your next playing field. Take a stand and use your leadership and resources to create a better world for the next generations, both yours and everyone else's.

A multifaceted and balanced life not only makes you a more capable and successful executive but also makes living it more fun and engaging. The best executives I work with find strategies for leveling up multiple areas with the same initiatives. For me, it's been getting outdoors and going on adventures with my kids. It checks the mental health box, the family box, and the personal development box.

You won't always have a perfect balance, and that's not the goal. Things will flow and change. The goal is to monitor, create intentions, and take actions to keep things from getting too out of whack. The best executives make this a regular habit rather than trying to save things when they are in crisis.

Bruce Eckfeldt 3/21/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 3/21/24

If You Want to Scale Faster, Choose a Niche and Excel in It

Forget competition, embrace differentiation: a proven strategy for growth.

When I founded my tech company, I spent the first several years solely focused on acquiring clients and generating revenue. It was a hustle that I enjoyed and excelled at. Finding prospects, conducting sales meetings, developing proposals, and closing deals. I enjoyed the challenge and the thrill.

Over time, I had to bring on other people to help market and sell our services. It forced us to become more focused and systemized. I had to figure out what we were selling, to whom, and what the real benefits of our solutions were. This compelled us to rethink our strategy. I realized that until that point, I was just chasing money and trying to nip at the heels of our bigger competitors.

What I quickly realized was that I was never going to really compete with the big dogs by trying to go head-to-head. It was easy to find a few scraps here and there, but it would be a brutal and bloody process. Instead, I realized that we needed to offer something different, something that couldn't be reduced to a price war.

After reading dozens of books, taking several courses, and even hiring several consultants, we crafted a unique position in the market tailored to specific core customers. This allowed us to refine our operations and services and to create a unique selling position. We no longer had to compete on price, and we dramatically reduced the sales lead time and increased our success rate.

Now, as a strategic coach, I've worked with dozens of companies on positioning, operations, and sales. Here are some key aspects I focus on to help teams craft a unique market position and accelerate growth.

1. Clarify your purpose.

I always start by clarifying why we're even in business. This helps remind us of the reason we do the work and sets a north star for guiding the rest of the work we need to do. I like a simple formula that clarifies who we serve, what we provide them, and the benefits they get from our products/services.

The trick here is to define this in such a way that it's narrow and focused, yet expansive enough to be pursued over decades. A good long-term purpose will help you make decisions on every other part of the business. If it's too broad, it lacks direction; if it's too narrow or short-term, it fails to inspire innovation.

2. Understand your core customer.

Too many companies I speak to say they can do anything for anyone. While they might have a broad range of skills and capabilities beneficial to many businesses or customers, trying to be everything to everyone just doesn't work. You need to clarify who you serve and why to create an effective strategy.

When defining your core customer, I like to focus on four key things: demographics, which provide insights into their profile and whereabouts; psychographics, which tells you their core values and what topics and content will resonate with them; needs and fears, which clarify why they are buying and what your solution will do for them; and buying triggers, which tell you when they are likely in the mood to start a sales conversation.

3. Identify all competitors.

Once the core customer is defined, it's essential to identify competitors. Once we have this list, we can look at each competitor's unique attributes and how they are approaching the market. The trick here is to look deeper than price. Some competitors may excel in quality, others in service, and some in ease of implementation.

Be sure to consider direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors are other solutions similar to yours that a prospect would consider in comparison to you. Indirect competitors are solutions that solve the problem but in very different ways. This might include building a solution in-house or even just coping better and living with the problem. Knowing all of the options a prospect has is crucial.

4. Find your white space.

Once you have the competitive landscape mapped out, you can plot everyone on the various criteria that your customers use to make a purchase decision. I like visualizing this in a chart so you can see the areas that have a lot of competition and, hopefully, a few areas where nobody seems to be excelling.

The goal here is to find some white space where you can craft a differentiated position and stand out in the market. This might be by selecting one or two areas that are completely open or combining a few attributes in a valuable way that's unique in the market.

5. Innovate key activities.

After you've found a new market position, you can start looking at your operations and delivery. While there are many things you need to do well as a business to be successful, find eight to 12 key activities that will directly drive your success in your new niche. Focus your efforts and innovation on these areas. Everything else should just be "good enough." The goal here is to put more wood behind fewer arrows.

The key to strategy is to focus your efforts and energy. Without a clear strategy, spreading too thin and pursuing too many targets is inevitable. Strategy is about choices and aligning everyone in the organization around a core set of key decisions about who you are and what you do. Getting these questions right and making real commitments will accelerate your growth and success. Continuing to chase everything with a dollar sign will quickly leave you exhausted and likely going in circles.

Bruce Eckfeldt 3/7/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 3/7/24

Strategy Is More Than a Pretty Plan

Many companies face the challenge of creating a strategy but struggle to implement it effectively. Here are eight ways to focus your operations to drive impact.

Creating a strategy is hard work. It requires reliable data, keen insights, a touch of innovation, and a lot of difficult decision-making. When executed effectively, it can create clarity and focus that can truly accelerate a business's growth and profitability. If done poorly, it can be a time and money pit that leaves you more confused than when you began.

However, the most challenging aspect of the strategy is implementation. A strategy that doesn't drive actions remains a dream. You need to drive strategy into the heart of a business operational system to see an impact. The key to achieving this is to identify and focus on a specific set of operational activities.

As a strategic coach who has collaborated with dozens of companies on strategy, I prefer using what Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter calls an "activity fit map." An AFM captures the unique and focused set of interconnected activities that drive a company's market positioning. While a company needs to excel in various aspects, the AFM identifies activities where exceptional performance, not just adequacy, is essential.

Creating an AFM can be challenging and somewhat of an art. While they evolve, it's crucial to refine them from the beginning. When guiding teams on strategy, I encourage considering the following factors when generating their map.

1. Capabilities and capacity

The initial focus should be on assessing raw capabilities and capacity. Can you do the things that you need at the volume/quantity that you need to do them? Building capabilities and capacity is a fundamental way to establish differentiation. Possessing the ability to do things that competitors can't do at a volume they can't support is a core value driver.

2. Processes and procedures

Some companies have capabilities similar to their competitors'. However, differentiation is still achievable by improving and excelling in variables such as speed of delivery or quality. In these cases, having well-structured processes and procedures becomes a differentiating advantage. You'll win in the market if you can deliver faster, more consistently, and with high quality.

3. Policies and business rules

In some cases, your ability to drive strategic value is based on the decisions you make, whom you make them with, and how quickly you can make them. A classic example of this is Southwest Airlines' decision to only use 737 airplanes. This choice simplified pilot training, reduced maintenance complexity, and standardized operational procedures. It was a simple rule that had a far-reaching positive impact on the company's ability to deliver on strategy.

4. Knowledge and data

Many companies have generated strategic value by accumulating a substantial volume of data and insights. These can be used to identify patterns and trends, as well as create insights for customers that other companies just can't provide. Evaluate what your business has or could capture that might be of value to your prospects.

5. Relationships and reputation

If you've been in business for a while and have a good reputation and deep relationships with key companies, you can turn that into a strategic advantage. These relationships will provide access to supplies, information, and talent, along with the ability to forge new relationships quickly based on your history. IBM, for example, was hired many times because of its reputation and weight in the industry.

6. Intellectual property and copyrights

While enforcing intellectual property and copyrights can be costly, it gives potential competitors pause before going head-to-head with you. If you have or can obtain legal protection for what you do or how you do it, it could create strategic value. Just be sure the cost is reasonable and that it's enforceable and difficult to circumvent.

7. Talent and expertise

Although people can come and go, having a team of highly skilled and capable staff is a real advantage in many businesses. For service companies like law, engineering, architecture, and design, significant experience in specific industries and deep experiences in domains can be key to driving strategic value.

8. Sourcing and supplies

For many companies, strong relationships and formal agreements with key suppliers are strategically important. If you have access to supplies and materials that others don't, or maybe at a price or volume that others can't get, you can create leverage. When possible, secure exclusive agreements to lock out competitors or negotiate a pricing agreement that gives you a clear advantage.

A great strategy without a set of operational activities to back it up isn't worth the paper it's written on. If you want to be successful, you need a clear and specific differentiated position and the operational plan to make it happen. The best strategies are ones that lead to operational focus and innovation, not just pretty slideshows.

Bruce Eckfeldt 2/29/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 2/29/24

Journaling Is a Core Practice for Leadership Development

Here are 5 strategies to help accelerate your growth.

There are many ways to develop as a leader, such as taking courses, reading books, attending seminars, or even hiring leadership coaches like me. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, playing a unique role in your development. However, there is one practice that is fundamental in every leader's development toolset, and that is journaling.

Journaling allows you to observe and analyze your thinking in a way that no other feedback tool can match. By putting your thoughts on paper, you can see how you approach a situation, frame the context, process the information, and make decisions. This perspective provides us insights and allows us to make connections that are often elusive when thoughts remain in our heads. Furthermore, journaling is something anyone can do with the simplest of tools, which means it's cheap, accessible, and easy to start.

While just about any form of journaling can have benefits, there are a few techniques I use with executives who are looking to improve their leadership skills. While I like good old pen and paper, digital journaling apps can be just as effective and convenient. Learn and use these techniques to focus and structure your journaling for different situations.

1. Mind sweep

This technique is great for getting everything rattling around your head onto paper. Start by writing down all the thoughts, ideas, reminders, and anything else that pops into your mind. I find that after a few minutes, my thinking slows down. I'll take another few minutes to dig deeper to purge everything. Then, once I have a list in front of me, I can start processing things into action items, things to think about more later, and things I'm just going to forget about. Seeing the list allows my mind to let go of these and frees up space to concentrate and do focused work.

2. Decision making

One of the key skills I work on with leaders is decision making. In this journaling practice, we write to our future, more enlightened self. In our journal, we explain the situation as we see it, the information we have and how we analyze it, the options we can see, which option we're choosing and why, and what we expect our outcomes to be.

Later, we can review the entries and compare what we wrote with how things actually turned out. We look for things we missed and errors we made. Maybe we failed to gather some key information, missed an option that could have been better, or were blind to a risk that could have been avoided. Sometimes we find that there was nothing we could have done better. The goal here is to learn what we want to do differently in the future to avoid the same mistakes and to lock in good practices.

3. Envisioning

When striving toward a big goal or embarking on significant changes, the future can seem foggy and confusing. Taking some time and creating a clear and compelling vision of the future state we're working toward can provide motivation and clarity. I do this with individuals and teams to increase desire, uncover risks, and create alignment. The richer the descriptions you can use, the more impactful and valuable the process becomes.

4. Reflecting

Sometimes you need time to sit and recall what happened in a given situation and how you felt about it. Reflecting on an event and writing down specific details about what happened allows you to better see what actually happened. By recalling your emotional reactions, you can map how these things impacted and affected you. The key here is to separate what happened from the meaning you gave it. This practice allows you to see your subconscious at work so you can better prepare and handle these types of situations in the future.

5. Dumping

When you're overwhelmed and your mind is racing, or you just can't let something go and it's nagging you, dumping is a great technique. The focus here is to write anything and everything down that comes to mind as quickly as you can. Generally, I suggest 15-20 minutes to get the full effect. Set a time and just start writing, don't stop, and don't worry about spelling or grammar or even readability. The point here is to empty your mind. Don't overthink it. After the timer goes off, take a minute to relax. If you want, go back and see if there are any nuggets of ideas or action items, but you can just move on as well. The point here is to flush your mind of thoughts, not to process or analyze.

Many executives have made journaling a core personal practice and have written daily and created hundreds, even thousands, of entries, giving them a treasure trove of insights. If you're serious about your improvement and development as a leader, I highly recommend incorporating journaling into your daily routine.

Bruce Eckfeldt 2/22/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 2/22/24

5 Ways to Level Up Your Team Retreat and Create More Impact

There are lots of ways a retreat can go wrong. Here's how to do it right.

As a strategic leadership coach, I’ve conducted hundreds of team and leadership retreats for dozens of companies. I love the retreat format as it gets people out of their day-to-day environments, gets them thinking and interacting in new and different ways, and gives them the time and space to go deeper than they normally can. The best retreats are held in inspiring places, taking advantage of local activities and culture to fuel the team with increased motivation, new perspectives, and stimulating adventures.

However, I’ve often witnessed retreats falling flat. Sometimes, it was because the planning wasn’t done properly, other times because the team just couldn’t stay on topic and complete their agenda, and occasionally because teams didn’t go deep enough to truly resolve their issues.

Here are five key ways to avoid these pitfalls and to increase your likelihood of success and the impact of the time and energy you and your team invest in your next retreat.

1. Set clear objectives and success criteria

Before you start planning your retreat, ensure you establish clear objectives and success criteria. This includes the key issues, topics, and decisions that need to be made and a clear and specific set of outcomes that you want to achieve by the end of the program.

The best retreats maintain a clear focus. My suggestion is to address 3-5 significant issues deeply rather than skimming through a long list on a surface level. Choose high-impact and complex items that can benefit from in-depth discussions. Clearly define the scope of the discussion, along with the desired outcomes and decisions that need to come out of the meeting.

2. Get buy-in on the agenda

Too often, I see leaders come into a retreat with a meticulously crafted agenda, only to discover at the beginning of the meeting that everyone else in the room wants to talk about other issues. Leaders then face the dilemma of pushing their agenda forcefully or abandoning their plans and making it up on the spot. This can be avoided by engaging with your team beforehand and discussing open issues/topics they want to address.

3. Establish good ground rules

Even the best teams fall into bad meeting habits and have tendencies to get carried away and chase issues down rabbit holes. Retreats are a significant investment in time, energy, and money that should be used wisely. One of the best ways to keep things on track is to create and agree upon a clear set of ground rules for how you are going to conduct yourselves.

Effective ground rules should cover topics such as confidentiality, conflict resolution, ensuring everyone has a chance to speak, and maintaining focus on solutions (rather than blame). I also like to ensure that everyone has a clear role in the retreat so the workload is shared and people stay engaged.

4. Push out of your comfort zone

A successful retreat uses the unique space and extra time to delve deeper into issues. This often entails exploring potentially uncomfortable and contentious topics. But it’s in these difficult conversations where real change and breakthroughs can occur. Be willing to enter the danger and tackle issues that seem scary. A well-defined set of ground rules and an experienced facilitator can make this process much easier and more productive while reducing the risk that things spiral.

5. Commit to clear action items

All the discussions and ideas in the world are futile if they don’t translate into action. Ensure that you’re capturing actions and commitments as you go. For ideas or topics that are unresolved or need more discussion, put them in the parking lot for review at the end of the retreat. Close the retreat with a detailed recap of who is responsible for what and by when. I also suggest you have a follow-up call a week later to confirm that people are executing their commitments.

Retreats are a powerful tool for any team. They are a big investment, but they often lead to major insights and breakthroughs that can yield significant returns. Use these suggestions to maximize your chances of success and quality of outcomes. Great teams make retreats more than a boondoggle, they use them strategically to drive growth and change.

Bruce Eckfeldt 2/15/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 2/15/24

The Vegas Rule and 4 Other Proven Rules for Great Meetings

Successful teams have a high degree of psychological safety. Here are five ground rules to help you run more successful meetings.

I've been coaching for more than 20 years now, working with dozens of teams and facilitating hundreds of meetings, both large and small. Although each meeting varies with different people and different objectives, there are some core principles and practices I use in all of them.

One of the key meeting practices I use is establishing ground rules. Simply put, these are agreements that the team makes about how they will conduct themselves to ensure they stay focused, be productive, and achieve desired outcomes.

Here are five key ground rules focused on creating safety in the meeting, as safety is critical to addressing the real issues a team needs to discuss. Without these ground rules, a team is either likely to avoid the issues altogether, or if they do tackle them, they risk creating more issues than making progress.

1. The Vegas rule

The foundation of safety is knowing that what you say will be held in confidence. If you're worried that what you say could reach someone you don't expect or want, you'll quickly edit and limit what you say to protect yourself. Worse, if you assume confidentiality and it's broken, you'll likely never trust the person or situation again, killing open and honest communication.

Don't just assume confidentiality. At the start of every session I run with any team, we explicitly state the Vegas rule. We agree that what happens and is said in a meeting stays in the meeting. If anything comes up that someone needs to take outside of the meeting, they must get everyone's permission first.

2. Tackle issues, not people

While I want everyone to be nice and respectful, I also want them to address issues directly. I want them to lean into these topics and express what they think and feel. The challenge is if people make personal attacks or perceive things as personal attacks, then everyone will get defensive and likely counterattack and/or shut down.

The solution is to ensure people focus on the issue and don't make things personal. Comments and criticism should address the issues, behaviors, and dynamics, not the people. If something comes across as personal or someone takes something personally, we stop, reframe, and create safety until we can proceed productively.

3. Yes, and ...

Years ago, I took an improv workshop. While I didn't last long in doing comedy, I carried with me an idea that I've applied to the meetings I facilitate today. When doing an improv session with others, one of the foundational rules is not to contradict or negate the other partner's storyline. If someone says the sky is green, you don't correct them. You just build on it. This allows the scene to grow and evolve rather than fall flat.

In meetings, I have people remove "but," "however," "no," and "maybe" and have them use the phrase "yes, and ..." to start any response. Even if they are going to completely contradict the person, they just need to start with "yes, and ..." This keeps the conversation going and prevents things from shutting down and people clamming up. Give it a try.

4. Equal airtime

One key habit of the best teams is that everyone has a chance to speak, and everyone's voice is truly heard. Research shows that when everyone on the team speaks about the same amount of time during the meeting, team performance improves. Members regulated themselves from monopolizing the conversation and made a point of engaging and sharing their thoughts.

I encourage my teams to strive for an equal airtime policy. For some, this means they need to think about their point, be focused, and not ramble. For others, it's about speaking up, saying what they are thinking, and participating more in the discussion.

Generally, people know who is in which camp. If you want to get fancy, there are some fun apps and virtual meeting plugins that track talk time and will publish the data after the meeting. It's great feedback.

5. Enter the danger

Often, I find that teams want to avoid difficult and sensitive topics. Typically, they want to decrease friction or hard feelings. While keeping things pleasant is understandable, it usually leaves a team stuck and unable to improve. The issues that typically hold a team back are often complex and can come with some strong feelings. But avoiding them doesn't fix the problem.

By invoking "enter the danger," we agree not to shy away from difficult conversations or topics. I encourage members to check in with their gut. If something feels uncomfortable or gives someone a sinking feeling, it probably means we need to talk about it. By taking the risk and bringing it up, we create the opportunity for important issues to be discussed and resolved.

I have dozens of other ground rules I use in meetings to keep things focused and on topic, but these are the most important ones, and I always start with them. Without safety and ensuring we can really dig into the topics and issues that are holding a team back, we'll stay on the surface, and the team will remain stuck. If we want higher levels of performance, we need to dig deeper into the issues.

Bruce Eckfeldt 2/8/24 Bruce Eckfeldt 2/8/24

Budgeting Is a Critical but Rare Business Competency.

Planning projects and developing budgets are critical functions in all businesses. Don't wing it. Use this guide to help get the best outcome for you and your team.

Growing a business requires investment. To maximize the investment, good project planning and budgeting are essential. As a strategic business coach, I help companies formulate a clear strategy and identify the projects that need focus to drive growth. While many of the companies I work with have good project planning skills, budgeting often proves to be a challenge.

Here are seven steps to create a budget that is both accurate and useful.

1. Set clear success criteria.

The first thing is to establish a clear and objective set of success criteria for your project. Most teams miss this step and struggle to align themselves with a clear set of actions. This is because they all have a different vision for what they are trying to accomplish and different metrics that define success.

2. Determine an expected return on investment.

Every project should yield some form of return. This could be a direct financial return, but it could also be measured in other ways, such as increasing production capacity, expanding distribution reach, and developing intellectual property.

The point is to create a set of reasonably objective measures of return for the time, money, and energy you'll be putting into the project and to measure the results over time. This will allow you to monitor progress and make necessary adjustments.

3. Identify key risk factors.

Every project has risks involved. The only way to avoid risks is just to stay home and not try. The questions on each project are:

Have we uncovered all of the risks?

Can we manage and mitigate the risks?

How are we going to monitor risks to give us time to respond effectively?

Most projects fail not because they have a poor plan but because they fail to anticipate risks that could have been addressed and mitigated with some foresight.

4. Figure out major work efforts.

Once high-level goals, expected returns, and risks are identified, you can begin planning the work. Start with significant sections and phases. Find clear break points in the work streams and natural transition points in the process.

Begin to organize the work into smaller tasks and work plans using project management tools like Gantt charts and PERT--program evaluation and review technique--charts to figure out dependencies and the proper order of events.

5. Crowdsource work estimates.

Estimating may be the hardest part of a project; and often the part that is most poorly done. The only way to get a truly accurate estimate is to do the project a few times, collect data, and find averages and likely variations.

Given that this is impractical in most situations, you need to interpolate and extrapolate from other projects and experiences. One of the best ways to do this is to use real-time feedback from groups in a method called the wisdom of the crowds, an approach developed by James Surowiecki and described in his 2005 book by the same name. By independently collecting data from different people with different perspectives, you can analyze averages and spreads to gain a better understanding of the effort likely to be involved.

6. Calculate reasonable contingencies.

Rather than padding each task with extra time, estimate each task within an 80 percent confidence interval and then calculate your contingency at the overall project level. If you are highly confident in your estimates, you might only need a 10-20 percent contingency for the project.

If you're highly uncertain, you might need 100 percent or more in your budget. Dial it in based on complexity, risk, and familiarity with the tasks.

7. Set clear decision milestones.

Most project horror stories involved projects that have spiraled out of control and spent huge amounts of time and energy trying to save them. Eventually, they fail, necessitating a complete restart, often with a brand-new team. Instead, create clear decision points with progress requirements, and if you don't meet the milestone, stop the project and replan from the ground up.

Don't get caught in the sunk-cost fallacy and feel the pressure to keep going just because you've already spent time and energy. In complex, high-pressure situations, flip the process and assume you're canceling the project at each milestone and only continuing if all the milestone requirements are successfully met. It's better to lick your wounds and start over than bleed out on the field.

While there are all types of projects with their characteristics and challenges, these guidelines can ensure adherence to core best practices, increasing your chances of success. You'll run into issues and have setbacks, but great teams understand this part of the process and hit more base hits than strikeouts over time. You don't need to be perfect, you just need to be better than the competition.

Bruce Eckfeldt 10/11/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 10/11/23

5 Books on Sales Every Leader Should Read

If you want to grow and scale your business, you need to get sales working right. These five books will help.

When I founded my technology company, I thought I was brilliant at sales. I had closed several million-dollar deals at the company I worked at previously and was a rockstar. I figured it would be easy to find a few projects each month to feed the team we built and grow the business quickly.

I was wrong. I quickly began to struggle with finding good quality leads, and the leads I did find would stall and go dark or pull out at the last minute. The lack of sales quickly began to hinder the company’s growth, and I began to question my skills and value as a CEO.

I did what any effective business leader should do when they are stuck. I hired a coach. She helped me see that my problem was not my skills, my smarts, or my motivation; it was my strategy and process. To get effective and predictable sales, you need a system and a framework. Once I had these in place, there was no stopping us.

Here are five key books that I read early in that process that really changed the way I thought about sales and selling. If you’re looking to grow and scale your business and need more and better sales, I highly recommend these books.

1. To Sell is Human - by Dan Pink

I always start here. So many leaders say that they don’t like sales or that they don’t want to be perceived as a slimy salesperson. Boloney. Everyone sells to everyone every day of their lives. We just don’t always call it sales or think of it as selling. Get over it.

The sooner we realize and embrace that selling is a natural and fundamental process in our everyday lives, the sooner we can embrace the role and excel at it. Pink deconstructs our stereotypical notion of the pushy salesperson and shows selling is a natural and necessary skill for anyone, not just business people. He makes it approachable and palatable. Do I dare say, even honorable?

2. Challenger Sale - by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson

Matt and Brent break down what really works in sales organizations. Backed by real research and copious data, they looked at several different types of salespeople who drive performance in high-growth companies. What they find is a little surprising and counter-intuitive.

While individual performance will often go to the lone wolf salesperson who treks out into the world alone to stalk their prey and bring home the kill, the best sales organizations are made of challenger salespeople. These are the people who are consultative and help the client navigate the sales process.

The key is they are willing and able to challenge the prospect’s thinking and help consider new perspectives and criteria they may not have thought of initially. These challenger salespeople are not only highly effective, but they also work systematically using a process and tools that are repeatable and trainable. If you want to build a sales system and a sales team, this book is a must-read.

3. Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers - by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

Not to be confused with the EOS book Traction, Weinberg and Mares outline the 19 key ways in which growth companies generate leads. This includes everything from SEO and SEM, tradeshows, affiliate programs, and gorilla marketing. It’s a useful and comprehensive list.

I have clients read through the strategies and evaluate them on three key criteria. First, what do you have content and materials for? Second, what do you like doing and are good at? And finally, which channels are your target customers likely to be using and open to a buying conversation? Find two or three that score well on all of these, and you’re off to the races with a few new lead-generation techniques.

4. New Sales. Simplified - by Mike Weinberg

Weinberg breaks down the complex and overwhelming process of selling into three basic steps. First, select the right targets. Second, create effective sales weapons. And third, plan an effective attack. While simple, most companies get these steps wrong. They fail to define their ideal targets. They create lackluster selling materials. And they go to market with a hope and a prayer, rather than a plan.

This book walks through all of these steps and gives tons of ideas and suggestions for how to make your sales process not only more effective but easier to build and manage. The goal here is to have a system you can use consistently and repeatedly to generate predictable revenues and scale your business. This book does it.

5. Spin Selling - by Neil Rackham

I read this book years ago when I first started my technology company. Until then, I sold based on rapport and luck. This book gave me a framework to think about the sales process and conversation and helped me understand the buying process and how I could structure it into a simple set of stages.

Rackham outlines the SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) approach and gives you clear and easy-to-remember queues for each stage. By making sure you’re working through the key questions, you will increase your chances of success and quickly kill leads that are not ready or not a fit for your solutions.

Sales is a natural and necessary skill for any business person. However, if your job is to find leads and close deals, you need to become an expert. These books are a great starting point and will give you the foundations for becoming a high-performance sales superstar.

Bruce Eckfeldt 10/1/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 10/1/23

3 Ways to Stop Procrastination and Be More Productive

The key to getting important tasks done is developing effective strategies for getting started.

My role as a strategic coach is to help organizations figure out how they're going to scale more effectively and more efficiently. One of my primary focuses is helping the senior executives in becoming more productive and enabling them to accomplish more strategic work on top of their day-to-day responsibilities.

As a company grows, the complexity and number of tasks increase exponentially. Without a strategy and a clear plan, most leaders get bogged down on the never-ending list of urgent items. If you don't make time for strategic work, it will never get done and the company will never scale.

One of the challenges of strategic work is that oftentimes, the tasks are big and complicated. In these cases, many executives find themselves in analysis paralysis and end up just deferring to the urgent tasks of day-to-day work.

The best way to overcome this roadblock is to have effective strategies for getting started on the work even if it seems daunting and overwhelming at first. Here are some of the ways that I find highly successful leaders make quick initial progress on strategic work.

1. Find simple first steps

One of the best things you can do when trying to get started on complicated work is to figure out a simple first task that will get you started. By breaking things down into small steps and figuring out one first step you can make that will give you traction, you will begin the process of building momentum.

Much like lean/agile product development, the goal is to figure out the smallest and simplest thing you can do to gain knowledge, information, and test out your assumptions. Once you begin the feedback flywheel, you'll quickly see new paths and be able to map out how you'll achieve success.

2. Create time boxes

As a writer, I know that writer's block is a real challenge and can be difficult to overcome. One of the most effective strategies is to commit to a fixed amount of time to just sit and write anything that comes to mind. By focusing on making a time commitment and not worrying about exactly what you're trying to accomplish, you can free up your mind and let your thoughts flow.

The same principleis true with complicated projects. By just setting aside 30 minutes and sitting down to think about the project tasks, they will start to reveal themselves and you can start working. The key to the strategy is setting up the right context and making sure your space is distraction-free so you can really sit down and think about what needs to get done.

3. Talk it through

One of my roles as a coach is to serve as a sounding board. In my work with executives, I often just let them talk through what they're thinking and the strategies they're considering. Often I don't even have to say anything; by just letting them talk they will begin to organize their thoughts and clarify their strategies.

If you're feeling stuck, find someone who's a good listener, and just talk them through what you're trying to do, what your goals are, and how you're thinking of approaching it. They don't need to be knowledgeable about the situation or the project, they just need to be good at asking clarifying questions and checking your rationale. In fact, you don't even need a real person, sometimes just talking to yourself or an inanimate object will give you the space you need to organize your thoughts.

Regardless of the strategy you use to get going once you get started on something, it's much easier to keep the momentum. Oftentimes, you just need to break through that first step to set everything into motion.

Bruce Eckfeldt 8/31/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 8/31/23

High-performance teams are built on trust. Here are 5 key techniques to increase yours

High-performance teams are built on trust. Here's how to earn more and increase production.

As a strategic coach, my job is to help senior teams develop a clear plan for creating a differentiated market position that will drive profitable growth and build leadership capacity for execution. And having worked with dozens of teams across multiple industries, I’ve discovered many common challenges that all companies face.

At the top of the list is a lack of trust in leadership. This can show up as apathy toward objectives, a lack of commitments or accountability, politics, and personal agenda, or even outright hostility and conflict. Left unaddressed, these will undermine team performance and create animosity.

Here are five things you can focus on to address the issues head-on and build trust. The sooner and more directly you tackle these issues, the sooner you’ll see better results and avoid bigger problems.

1. Get to know each other

The foundation of any high-performance team is the web of individual relationships. A team made up of individuals who know each other as people, appreciate their unique strengths and weaknesses, and know about each other's personal histories and lived experiences will have the connective tissue in place to weather any storm. Teams of people who see each other merely as co-workers, or worse: competitors, will never reach their full potential.

I start all of my strategy and planning meetings with team exercises. These are specifically designed to take members out of their normal day-to-day roles and force them to interact in new and different ways. The goal with all of these is to create common bonds and appreciation that can be taken into strategic exercises and day-to-day operating interactions.

2. Create psychological safety

Fear kills culture. If an individual on a team is worried that what they do or say will be dismissed, judged, or retaliated against, they will not only resist openly sharing their ideas and opinions, they will resort to engaging in these same destructive behaviors. This creates a vicious cycle that can be difficult to reverse.

A high-performance team will have a clear set of ground rules that set basic working agreements for creating a safe and open space for sharing ideas and opinions. Making sure that conversations are confidential, agreeing not to engage in personal attacks, and making sure everyone has a chance to be heard are core to any team’s list.

3. Clarify business and team priorities

One of the key things I do as a strategic coach is to help teams clarify their purpose and their biggest goals. Often I find that teams are struggling to align and work well together because they lack a common vision for the future and a clear set of shared priorities. If people are pulling in different directions, it doesn’t matter how hard they try–they won’t get far.

Alignment starts with a clear articulation of the company, team purpose, and BHAG (big hairy audacious goal), followed by a well-defined set of cascading objectives and key results for getting there. These may be vague at first, but through an iterative process of exploration and refinement, the team will build a common vision and plan for execution.

4. Practice working through conflict

Oftentimes when I start working with teams, I actually focus on increasing the amount of conflict on the team rather than decreasing it. Teams often play too nicely. They avoid difficult questions and tough conversations. But until they get these critical topics on the table and start engaging with them, these teams will stay stuck.

Sometimes the topics are too big and complicated for the team’s current skill levels. In these cases, we can use exercises and tackle smaller topics while learning and practicing how to approach the bigger issues, framing them effectively for discussion, creating a safe and effective space, engaging in constructive debate, developing creative solutions, reaching compromises, and committing to actions.

5. Actively appreciate each other

Taking the time to give each other feedback is a core habit on all successful teams I’ve been part of and that I’ve coached. It not only feels good to hear what others appreciate about what you do and the value you create, it reinforces the behaviors and actions that drive impact.

At the end of each planning session I facilitate, I run an exercise where each person gives everybody else two key pieces of specific feedback. The key to both of these is to be specific with the behavior and the impact and to avoid pleasantries and niceties that are not actionable.

Through this exercise, everyone gets their feedback and basks in the glory of the wonderful things they are doing. They understand what they need to keep doing, and what they need to do differently. The point is for them to choose and commit to personal improvement.

Building trust is a function of understanding, respect, and safety. Without these, a team will struggle and deliver subpar results. And while these take time, the right focus and exercises can accelerate the trust-building process while minimizing the drama.

Bruce Eckfeldt 8/28/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 8/28/23

5 Things That Need to be on Every CEO’s Role Scorecard

Everyone in your company needs a role scorecard, even the CEO. Here are five things that every CEO needs to be measured on.

As a strategic leadership coach, I spend the majority of my days running strategy and planning sessions and coaching executives on performance and leadership skills. Every leadership team I work with has a focus on commitment and accountability. It’s the lifeblood of high-performing teams.

One of the key tools I use to create clarity around performance management is the role scorecard. I keep it simple and focus on the 8-12 key activities and results that each role in the company needs to execute well on to be successful. This applied to everyone. Even the CEO.

While there are many things that need to go on a CEO’s role scorecard, here are the five I generally make sure are on the scorecard of every CEO I coach.

1. Leadership team performance

The first thing I focus on with CEOs is the design and effectiveness of their leadership team. If they haven’t surrounded themselves with the right people doing the right things, the company won’t get very far. CEOs need to make sure they have crafted the proper set of roles with clear performance criteria. The right design and role details will be a function of the business strategy and the nature of the CEO and their strengths and weaknesses, so this will be unique for each situation.

The way that I put this on the CEO’s role scorecard is to average the role scorecard performance for their team. This requires them to make sure they have a clear role scorecard for each of their leadership team members with clear success criteria. The CEO is then scored on how well their team is doing. Generally, I give the CEO a green if 80% of their team is generally green on their scorecards and they have no reds on the team (individuals who are really struggling to perform).

2. Strategic planning effectiveness

One of the primary jobs of every CEO is to drive the strategic planning process and ensure that the company has defined an effective differentiated strategy and communicated across the company. A good strategy is key to business growth and success, and nobody is better positioned to do this than the CEO.

Generally, I focus on three things. One is making sure there is a strategic planning process in place that is being followed consistently. This includes the right set of meeting rhythms and planning documents and data sets.

Second is making sure that the strategy is implemented across the company. Here I’m looking for evidence that the strategic priorities are driving team and individual quarterly priorities and that operational decisions are considering and responding to strategic decisions.

Finally, I’m looking for market effectiveness. Basically, does the company have a well-differentiated position in the market that allows them to sell effectively and price their products/services at a premium level.

3. Talent development

Finding and retaining talent is crucial to every business, but doubly so for a company in growth mode. If you can’t identify talent needs quickly, find good candidates, hire quickly, onboard effectively, and develop and retain your people, you’ll struggle and likely not get very far.

As CEO, you should be on the lookout for senior talent that you need now or in the future. Develop relationships and connections that you can nurture over time. When you meet someone you think is a good cultural fit and has the skills/experience you’ll need in the future, make a note and maintain a relationship with that person.

4. Financial management

Managing cash and deploying capital effectively are the two key financial responsibilities of the CEO. Even if you have a strong financial lead on your leadership team, you need to know these two things intimately. Take your eye off this ball, and bad things will happen.

Managing cash is managing your business's oxygen. Without it, you’ll die a quick and painful death. Make sure you know what your operating cash requirements are and have a good handle on incoming revenues and any accounts receivable issues.

Deploying capital is your second key financial priority. Knowing where you’re spending your limited resources and making sure you’re investing in the right areas of the business can be the difference between making the Inc 500 list several years in a row and burning through your hard-earned profits with nothing to show for it.

5. Company culture

Finally, every CEO needs to be driving company culture. This doesn’t mean you need to get into the dunk tank at your next company retreat, but you do need to have systems in place for measuring culture and reinforcing core values and standards.

One of the best things to do is catch people doing the right thing and publicly acknowledge them. Be specific and clear. A strong culture will attract the right employees and clients while also repelling the wrong employees and clients.

While there are many other things I will put on role scorecards for CEOs, these go on just about every single one. Not having these on a scorecard means that those less skilled and more poorly positioned will have to focus on them instead, or worse: nobody is doing them, which will lead to problems quickly and with far-reaching consequences.

Bruce Eckfeldt 8/25/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 8/25/23

5 Ways To Increase the Value and Get a Premium Price for Your Company

Before you think about selling your company, make sure you implement these five key strategies.

The best time to start planning for your exit is before you start your company. The second best time to start planning is now. Every leader I’ve worked with who has been through the process of selling their business wishes they had started much sooner. Even in my own exit, I wish I had done several things months or even years prior.

And while it’s true that planning ahead can save a lot of time and headaches, it’s never too late to start working on things that will increase the value of your business and make the selling process easier and faster for you in the future. Here are five key areas to focus on that will make a real and significant impact on the terms of your sale.

1. Make yourself redundant

Nobody wants to buy a business that can’t run on its own. If you’re critical to multiple aspects of the business that couldn’t run without you, it’s not going to be attractive to a buyer. The best case is that you’ll be stuck with a long and highly restrictive earn-out period where you’ll still be working hard on a business you no longer own.

Start by looking at the key functions of the business and the activities that put cash in the bank. For each part that you play in these critical functions, start putting processes and systems in place to do that work. If need be, hire people that can take over these tasks and get you out of the critical path. Make it easy for a new owner to replace these roles if people leave.

2. Remove key customer risk

If 50% of your revenue comes from one customer and they happen to be your college roommate, you’re in trouble. A new owner is going to be at risk of losing that account after a sale and will likely discount your valuation significantly to offset that risk. Ideally, you want to have no one customer make up more than 10% of your total revenue, and lower is better. If you can’t lower the percentage, make sure you have bulletproof long-term contracts and a pristine relationship with them.

3. Have a differentiated strategy

Strategy is too often overlooked when it comes to valuation. If you’re just like everyone else and only really compete on price, there is no real advantage for a buyer to purchase you over your competitor. If you’re selling a commodity, then your business is a commodity, and your valuation will reflect it.

However, if you have a unique and differentiated position in your market, then you become much more valuable for a new buyer who wants to grow and scale the business. Having key capabilities that are difficult for competitors to copy will mean that people will pay you more for your business. Identify and invest in systems, tools, and technology prior to starting the sales process.

4. Systemize your processes

You might pride yourself on being customer-focused by finding new and innovative solutions for each and every new customer. However, this flexibility will hurt your valuation. A buyer wants to own a money-making machine. That means you need a straightforward way to develop leads, sell your products/services, deliver them consistently with high quality, and collect money quickly to put it in the bank.

Bespoke services and one-off solutions don’t scale, and they can’t be optimized for profits. Define precisely what you do for whom and focus on creating a defined and repeatable product or service. This will simplify everything: what you sell, how you sell, who to sell to, how you deliver, who you need to hire, etc. Don’t let “innovation” be an excuse for not being disciplined.

5. Deliver consistently

Nothing gives a buyer confidence like consistent results over time. If you can show that you’ve defined your strategy, set reasonable targets, executed consistently, and delivered revenue and profits effectively month-over-month, you can almost name your price. On the other hand, missing targets and erratic results will make a buyer think twice and will undoubtedly reduce what they are willing to offer you.

While there are many factors that go into the terms of a business sale, these are some of the key ones. More importantly, these are some of the ones you can control as an operator that will increase your valuation. Every sale is different, but the fundamentals don’t change much. Focus on these to give yourself the best shot at a lucrative exit.

Bruce Eckfeldt 8/24/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 8/24/23

5 Execution Mistakes That Challenge Most Leadership Teams

If you want to grow and scale your business quickly, avoid these five execution mistakes that trip up many leadership teams.

Having been an Inc 500 CEO and now a strategy coach to dozens of growth companies, I’ve seen what it takes for successful companies to grow and scale a business quickly and effectively…and many of the ways companies can fail. And while every company is in a unique situation and requires a unique strategy, there are some common core principles.

At the heart of any business is a leadership team. They set strategy, make decisions, evaluate trade-offs, calculate risks, and place bets on how to win in their market. The best teams are critical strategic thinkers, but they are also masters of execution. Putting plans into action and successfully navigating the fog of the day-to-day business is where the hard work is done.

I’ve seen many teams create innovative and brilliant approaches to winning in their market, only to flop on putting their plans in place. Here are five key areas I see teams getting wrong, and how to avoid them in your business.

1. Lacking a clear strategy

Driving your car as fast as you can into a brick wall doesn’t make much sense. Yet I’ve seen many teams driving—spending vast amounts of time, energy, and resources—into a business model that doesn’t make sense and has no clear differentiated position in the market. Without a clear understanding of what customers really want, what the competitive landscape looks like, and where the unique position is that will drive profitable growth, you’re likely going to have to compete on price, which is a bloody and painful war to try and win.

Instead, take the time and effort to really understand your customers and the competitive landscape. Find a set of attributes that will set you apart from the crowd and allow you to charge a premium price. Then, focus your operational processes and talent strategies on becoming excellent in a handful of values that truly differentiate you in the market.

2. Poorly defined roles and responsibilities

I run an exercise with all new timers where I ask them: who owns what? I have them work individually or in small groups, and when we come back to the table, there are always vast differences on what the roles are and who is in charge of what area of the business. Different names, multiple names, no names, and wrong names all reveal the underlying lack of role definition and clarity on ownership. This leads to duplicated efforts, conflicts, and dropped balls.

By carefully designing the senior leadership roles and clearly mapping out areas of responsibility and handoff points between functions, we create an effective map for everyone to follow. Assigning responsibilities to one and only one owner makes accountability much easier to manage and resolve. Everyone knows what they need to focus on and where they can depend on a colleague to execute. And as the business evolves, so can the roles evolve in a clear and comprehensive manner.

3. Unclear metrics and targets

Every game needs a goal and a way of keeping score. Yet most companies haven’t defined their desired success in objective terms and measurements. Most of the time when I ask teams to define success, I get vague statements about being a great place to work, making an impact, or having happy customers. And while these are great things to strive for, without an objective measure of what “great” or “impact” or “happy” really mean, everyone is left guessing and will likely be working toward different goals.

By defining success in clear and specific terms and using key metrics to measure progress, we create a means of evaluating actions and results that anyone on the team can use to guide their efforts. Knowing that freemium conversion rates, on-time delivery percentage, and project gross margins are key areas of focus will make decisions easier and faster to make. A business that has defined and agreed on its key metrics will have few arguments on which strategies and actions are working, which are not, and where to invest in the future.

4. No meeting rhythms

It’s great to set goals and make plans, but if you put them on the shelf only to look at them at the end of the quarter, you’ll never make any progress. Many teams I’ve met with do a great job of setting objectives, but they fail to put in the weekly reps to do the actual work and measure progress.

Running a high-growth company means there are always a thousand things to do and never enough time to get everything done. But if you want to be strategic, you must set aside time to meet and do the actual work. The best teams have a set schedule for meetings and dedicated time to work on strategy. It’s in their calendars, they have a clear and effective agenda, and they show up on time and prepared. Execution is about discipline and being proactive, not reactive.

5. Lack of leadership accountability

Many times when I work with companies, I have to increase the level of conflict on the leadership team. In an effort to be nice and be a good team player, teams shy away from disagreements and different opinions. The problem is that they’ve created a situation that lacks true buy-in and commitment which will then make it impossible to create a culture of accountability. Trying to be nice leads to nobody being held to task.

High-performance teams are engaged in lots of constructive conflicts. This doesn’t mean they fight; rather, they are willing to express different opinions, are critical of strategies and plans, and are willing to challenge each other to get to better ideas that are highly resolved. By really voicing their minds, it means they can truly embrace the conclusion and plans. This drives commitment and accountability. Without this rigorous debate, you’ll never get to higher levels of performance.

While mastering these five areas will not guarantee flawless execution, failing to master them will make it very likely you won’t. In the end, teams need to have both a clear strategic plan AND the ability to put it into action effectively.

Bruce Eckfeldt 8/24/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 8/24/23

The Best Peer Groups Allow for Deep Sharing and Learning by Embracing These 5 Habits

The best peer groups allow leaders to share challenges and get unvarnished feedback.

As a strategic business coach who’s worked with dozens of companies and hundreds of CEOs and business executives, I’ve seen the power that peer groups can have on professional development and leadership effectiveness. I’ve also run dozens of mastermind and peer groups and know firsthand what it takes for a peer group to be effective and impactful.

While every group is different in its focus and format, the best groups share a common set of values and habits. These values and habits allow members of the group to share deeply, provide important and meaningful insight about themselves and their situations, and create a context that fosters support and learning.

Here are the top five that I’ve seen which drive the most worth. If you’re in a peer group or thinking of joining one, consider how well you and your fellow members embrace these practices.

1. Show up and do the work

The first thing you need to do is show up, both physically and mentally. This means arriving with energy and focus, not tired and bedraggled. Get a good night’s sleep, work out, eat well, etc. Doing so will ensure that you’re able to pay attention and contribute to your utmost ability.

You also need to show up mentally. Rushing into these types of meetings from the office or a meeting with clients doesn’t give you the time and space you need to decompress and clear your mind. Take some time before your peer group meeting to relax and make the mental shift.

If you’re still processing a difficult conversation or your mind is racing from all of the follow-up items from your previous meetings, you won’t have the mindset to engage properly with your peers and the discussion topics.

2. Be vulnerable

The point of a true peer group is to get open honest feedback on your most pressing challenges and most important decisions. If you aren’t able or willing to really put everything on the table, your peers won’t be able to give you the input you need.

Obviously, this isn’t easy. Oftentimes, our biggest challenges stem from personal weakness, fears, and previous poor decisions. Admitting that we’re flawed and have internal shortcomings is not easy, but it’s the key to growth and development.

One of my favorite quotes from Brené Brown, the Harvard Business School expert on vulnerability, is “vulnerability is [seen as] courage in other people, but weakness in ourselves”

3. Speak from experience

If you’ve been part of organizations like the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) or Young Presidents' Organization (YPO) you know they follow something called Gestalt Protocol. This ground rule says that you can’t give other members advice. Instead, you are encouraged to share the learning experience that you’d had that relates to the person’s situation. While this can be a little awkward, it’s a great way to keep the conversation open and safe for everyone involved. This approach is great for any peer-group program.

By sharing experiences rather than telling people what they should do, you avoid making people defensive and keep them from feeling judged by fellow members. You also keep the person in control of their decisions and outcomes since they get to decide what to take away from your story. For everyone else in the group, they get to hear your learning and wisdom and can apply it to their own situations and challenges.

4. Give before you take

Too often I see people join these types of groups expecting immediate benefits and value. And while you will often get new insights quickly, you need to appreciate that it takes time for the group to develop and for people to get to know each other. When I run mastermind and peer groups, I tell everyone that they need to expect to be giving to the group before they can expect anything in return.

In fact, the more you focus on giving early on and without expectations, the sooner you’ll inspire others to give in return. And while there are no guarantees, giving generously and early will speed up the process. f you don’t get anything in return after a reasonable effort, then it might not be the group for you. In which case, it’s better to know sooner rather than later.

5. Practice gratitude

I find that these types of groups tell you what you need to hear, but not always what you want to hear. It can be hard to realize that your challenges stem from your own flawed thinking, ineffective skills, and inexperience. And while you might not like the feedback you’re getting, you need to welcome it and appreciate it. Practicing gratitude for everything you’re getting from the group will keep the lines of communication open and insight flowing.

Masterminds and peer groups are a unique and highly effective way to develop your leadership skills and business strategy. However, they can vary and present different experiences for many. Keeping these five key habits in mind will help both you and the others in your group in adding to and gaining value from the experience.

Bruce Eckfeldt 5/18/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 5/18/23

Great Executives Play to Their Strengths. Here's How to Find Yours

Focusing on your strengths will dramatically improve your success, but finding them can be challenging. Here are three key questions you can use to find yours.

We've all heard the adage, play to your strengths to win, but it's often easier said than done. Yes, it's better to pick a handful of skills and work on becoming exceptional than to try to be good at everything. Just like a business need to find a unique position in the market by becoming exceptional at a few things, executives also need to focus on becoming uniquely skilled and experienced in a handful of skills to become world-class professionals.

But how do you pick?

The challenge for many high-performance leaders is that they are good at many things. Often, they are the best person in their company at many things, which creates a lot of pressure to keep doing all of them. However, this will not only hold them back as individuals, it will hold back the company's growth as well.

To grow and advance, you need to let go of things that you may be quite good at to become uniquely amazing at a few more important skills. And to do that, you need to choose, which can be difficult. Here are the three key questions I give executives to help them understand the areas in which they should double down and focus.

1. What are you uniquely good at?

Start by figuring out what you're currently good at. Not just OK, but really good. What can you do that not many other people can do well? Start with comparing yourself within your organization, but also think more broadly about your market and industry. You might be the best public speaker in your CPA firm, but you might be below average in another industry.

The best way to do this is to get feedback from managers and colleagues. You might think you're terrible at something, but everyone else sees you as a rockstar. If you're getting surprising feedback, get curious and ask why, and get details about what you do that people see as valuable.

2. What creates value for your organization?

It's one thing to be really good at something, it's another to create exceptional value. The key with this step is that other people need to see it as valuable, not just you. Go through the things you do on a weekly basis and have people highlight the top two to three activities that they feel lead to improved business performance and results. This could be generating sales or revenues, optimizing the business or reducing costs, or developing talent or intellectual property.

Remember that value can be defined and identified in many ways. The easiest measure is money. Companies will pay higher salaries and better wages for more valuable services. Another indicator is autonomy. Generally, organizations give high-value contributors freedom around when and how they do the work. Finally, look for activities that get a lot of recognition and rewards. These are good indicators that an activity is important and contributes to organizational success.

3. What puts you in flow?

Finally, once you've found things you're good at and that drive value, look for the things that you are highly engaged in and motivated by. I like to focus on activities that naturally put you into a flow state. Originally identified by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a highly focused mental state that leads to exceptional performance outcomes.

Good indicators that you're in flow include the feeling that time slows down or speeds up, that your focus becomes narrower and tighter, that you don't have to think that hard about the work, that it seems to come naturally, and you're feeling a sense of engagement and accomplishment.

Once you've identified the three to five activities that score well on all these criteria, focus on doing more of that work and less of everything else. Remove the other activities by delegating them to other team members, hiring support staff or services, or just stop doing them if you can get away with it. Over time, you can continue to hone that list and further concentrate and advance those skills.

As you develop your capabilities, keep watching general industry and market trends. Be mindful of how the value of different skills might change in the future. Being a world-class typewriter repair person is just not that valuable in today's market. And in the near future, new skills will quickly become valuable and in high demand.

Highly successful executives find ways to become uniquely valuable in their industries, and they learn to adapt to changing market needs quickly. Asking yourself the three questions above and focusing on the answers to guide your growth will be the difference between getting a 5 percent cost of living adjustment and getting that promotion you've been waiting for.

Bruce Eckfeldt 5/17/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 5/17/23

5 Simple Ways to Improve Accountability

Most senior leadership teams struggle with accountability. Here's how to fix the issue and improve productivity quickly.

The lack of accountability on leadership teams is not because you have incapable people or because they lack the right motivation. Most executives I work with are exceptionally skilled with great experience. They are high-driven type-A professionals who are hungry to succeed. The issue in most cases is a lack of the proper frameworks, clear communication, and effective decision-making processes.

Here are the five top fixes for leadership teams struggling with accountability and delivering results consistently. If you're having issues in your company, the solution is likely one or more of these areas of improvement.

1. Develop a clear strategy

Before you can make any sort of progress, you need to know where you want to go. Without a clear set of objectives and decisions on what you want to achieve (and not achieve), you'll spin your wheels. I like to say that you can climb any mountain you want, just not every mountain you want. And if half your team is climbing Everest and the other half K2, you won't get very far.

Make sure you have a strategic plan and a strategic planning process that allows you to collect key insights about your customer and competitors to craft a differentiated position in your market. Find a handful of attributes you'll be known for, and then focus your operations on delivering on those promises. More important, identify all those things you are not going to do so you can focus your time, energy, and money.

2. Get buy-in from senior leaders

Sometimes the problem is not the strategy but rather the commitment to the strategy. I've seen CEOs go off on solo retreats and craft smart strategies only to return to the team and struggle to implement them. Generally, the problem is that the key functional leaders either don't really understand the why behind the strategy or just don't feel ownership of it.

Strategy development should instead be a process that involves key stakeholders with unique insights. Smart, highly driven people want to have input and influence over their work and effort, and including the right people in the process will ensure you're working with the right information. This results in decisions and directions that everyone feels bought into.

3. Have clear role descriptions

It's impossible to win a game if you don't know the rules. Yet, too many executives are in roles that have no clear description of responsibilities or measures of success. This means both that they don't know what they should really focus on, and that nobody else knows what to expect from them. Good, clear role descriptions for everyone on the leadership team means that the boundaries and handoffs between executives are clear and accountable. Further, these must be reviewed and revised as the company grows and evolves. I like to review these roles quarterly and catch any gaps or overlaps quickly, well before they become a problem.

4. Set absolute priorities

A strategy is worthless without a good execution process. You need a system for taking strategies and turning them into sets of actions with timeframes. The challenge often is that there is always a lot to do in a business; usually, far more to do than there is time. To create focus, you need not just a list of priorities but an absolutely prioritized list.

Each quarter I have teams identify the top three strategic priorities for the company for the next 90 days, assigning clear owners for each. Then we have each individual executive identify their personal top three priorities in order of importance.

Everyone knows that they shouldn't work on a lower priority item until they have done everything possible on the higher priorities. Also, if someone is struggling with a key company priority, everyone should drop everything else and help them finish by the end of the quarter.

5. Clarify success criteria

It's impossible to deliver something when you don't know what done looks like. The devil is in the details when it comes to accountability. Creating clear and measurable success criteria is key to driving results. Don't just say "hire a new program manager" by the end of the quarter; clarify if that means they have an offer letter in hand, or if they have accepted an offer, or if they have started their first day. Details matter, and expectations need to be set at the beginning of the time period.

Creating a culture of accountability is not about rewards and punishments. It's about clarity and setting challenging but achievable goals for leaders and managers. It's a muscle that develops and improves over time. The trick is to understand that it's not just about hiring good people. Great companies learn that accountability is a process that can be honed and improved over time.

Bruce Eckfeldt 5/16/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 5/16/23

5 Steps to Mastering Your Calendar and Increasing Your Productivity

Managing your calendar is a key skill for any executive. Here are five steps to running your days and weeks more strategically and productively.

The best strategy in the world is worthless unless the top executives have the time and focus needed to implement the required changes and initiatives. Too often, I find senior leaders overwhelmed with day-to-day operations, running around putting out fires and never making time to execute a strategic plan. And while everyone is capable and well-intentioned, progress just doesn't get made.

Here are five key steps I use to coach the executives I work with to improve management effectiveness and create space for new, more strategic tasks. While these five steps can take a few months to implement well, once you do, the effort quickly creates returns.

1. Know your highest-value activities

The first thing any executive must do is know where they create value for the organization. Maybe it's in developing strategic plans, maybe it's setting high-level technical architecture, maybe it's developing supplier partnerships, maybe it's selling to key prospects. Most executives have two to three fortes that create exceptionally more value for the organization than anything else.

This isn't what the executive spends the most time on. It's about value creation. Even if it's an activity that happens quickly and easily for the executive, it should be what directly or indirectly generates revenue and profit for the business. Often times this requires getting feedback from other senior leaders, customers, supplies, etc.

2. Discover your natural cycles

Humans are not machines. We have natural cycles of energy and focus, and interests. The most basic is the sleep/wake cycle that everyone goes through daily. There are other cycles that happen over the course of a day, the week, the month and even longer. Identifying, understanding, and optimizing these cycles is key to productivity.

Start by looking at your natural day. When do you naturally wake up and go to sleep? Are you a lark or a night owl? Then consider weekly cycles: are you naturally fresher on Mondays or do you hit your stride mid-week? You can also identify patterns around travel and other events. Maybe you get energized and productive just before a trip or maybe you know you're jet-lagged the day after a long flight and need to plan accordingly.

While you might not be able to completely change the external factors in your life, you can plan many activities according to these high and low points. If you're a lark, you might want to do your tasks requiring energy and focus in the morning. If you're a night owl, you might want to do these in the evening. Map the right activities to the right time and don't waste your high-value periods.

3. Create core time blocks

Start by creating blocks of time for your high-value activities and put them at the most opportune times in your schedule. This might be a few blocks in the morning early in the week or it might be afternoons mid-week. Think about the time of day, the days of the week, and what your ideal calendar should look like.

The point is to figure out your natural best times for focused work, meetings, exercise, eating, family time, etc., and then work to align your schedule and daily work plan to leverage these cycles, rather than trying to fight them. While it might take some time to iron things out, if you can create better alignment, you'll quickly see vastly improved results.

4. Protect your high-quality time

Once you've identified your high-value tasks and have put them in your highly productive time periods in your schedule, protect them ruthlessly. Do whatever you need to do to move everything else around those slots, and don't let things interfere and disrupt them.

I have executives who get a coworking office or go to a local coffee shop a few times per week to work on their high-value activities during peak performance times. They turn off their phone and put on headphones with focus music so they can't be found and don't get bothered. Most of them find that the three to four hours they spend in this mode creates 80-90 percent of their value for the week.

5. Delete, delegate, defer

With your task focus identified and your time blocks in your calendar, the next step is to get rid of everything else so you can free up more time to do high-value work. For all other tasks, and any new task that comes up, ask yourself three questions in this order: can I delete this?, can I delegate this? and finally, can I defer this until later? Being ruthless about these questions will remove many items from your plate.

Growing and scaling a business isn't hard when you have the right strategy and the discipline to focus on the right activities. What's hard is understanding and working within our natural limits and using that time strategically. It also requires us to prioritize key items and to say no to many things that pull our attention. Few teams master this quickly, but those who do will see the results and typically turn out to be the winners in their industry.

Bruce Eckfeldt 5/9/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 5/9/23

Taking Risks Is a Natural Part of Being in Business, Just Make Sure Yours Are Calculated

To maximize your chances of success, make sure the risks you take are the right ones.

Taking risks is a natural part of being in business. The key to dealing with them is to make sure you're balancing the downside with the upside. It's perfectly acceptable to take risks that give you an opportunity to make big wins. What's not acceptable is to put your company in harm's way when there's no upside. The challenge is that you can err both ways.

Here are a few key steps you can take to better calculate the tradeoffs of the decisions in front of you.

1. Brainstorm all possible risks

Once you develop a plan, the first thing is to brainstorm all the possible risks you might face. This includes internal risks associated with your ability to deliver on your tasks and efforts. It also includes external risks that might impact your ability to successfully complete your plan.

Like all brainstorming efforts, the trick here is to create the right context and mindset to explore all possibilities. Set yourself appropriate ground rules to allow for all ideas to get on the table, and suspend judgment and commentary in the beginning. Once you've created a sufficiently long and broad list, you can start to filter and prioritize.

2. Determine the likelihood of trouble occurring

Using the list you brainstormed, determine how likely each one of the troubling events is to occur. What most teams get wrong is that while certain specific risks are highly unlikely to cause a problem, categories of risk are actually more likely. While the chance of your facility getting hit by a tornado is low, having some type of weather-related event that disrupts operations is quite a bit higher. A solution here is to focus more on categories and types of events than specific scenarios.

3. Assess the impact on your business

Once you've identified the likelihood of each of these events happening, then assess how it will impact your business and project. Categorize the impact assessment on a similar scale as you did probability. This will allow you to see which events will generally have a low impact on your plans and which ones will have a more significant impact.

Once you've completed the likelihood and impact ratings, you can plot each risk on a chart that shows all risks brainstormed and how they relate to each other on these two axes. This will allow you to decide which actions to take for each situation.

4. Ignore all low-impact risks

The first thing to do is ignore anything that's low impact, even if it's a high-likelihood event, mainly because it's something I can just deal with if and when it occurs. Unfortunately, I see a lot of teams spending time and energy here. Usually, it's because low-impact risks are easier to deal with, and it feels good to solve them. But in fact, it's not a good strategic decision and will be a waste of your effort. You're better off focusing on higher-impact risks.

5. Create a plan of action for low-likelihood risks

For low-likelihood risks that have a chance to significantly impact the business or project, we want to make sure that we have a plan of action. We want to know what we would do should this risk occur and how we would mitigate and minimize its impact. This could be things like taking out insurance or having a backup plan or an alternate strategy in place. However, since this kind of event has little likelihood of occurring, I'm not going to spend much money, time, or energy mitigating the risk upfront.

6. Adjust your plans to avoid/minimize high-likelihood risks

The high-likelihood, high-impact risks are where you want to spend the bulk of your time, energy, and money. First, you want to look at how to change plans and strategies to avoid these risks in the first place. It's often easier and more efficient to just create a plan that makes these either low likelihood or low-impact right away. If you can't avoid these risks, you want to have a plan for how to mitigate their impact if they do occur.

No business is without risk, and if you were growing and scaling quickly, you'll be taking on more risk than other businesses. But that doesn't mean you need to accept a lower chance of success. By properly assessing all the risks you might face and categorizing them into the appropriate buckets, you can make smart plans to deal with them, or hopefully even avoid them altogether.

Bruce Eckfeldt 4/27/23 Bruce Eckfeldt 4/27/23

Want to Be a High-Achieving Executive? Do Fewer Things

The best executives know what they do well, and what they don't.

I've worked with hundreds of executives over the last two decades, helping them figure out how to grow and scale their businesses and build high-performance teams. And while I'm generally focusing on the overall business growth and success, I've learned that if we're going to scale a business, we also need to scale the people running it. If we don't, we'll quickly hit limits and ceilings.

The challenge in many early-stage companies is that the executives running them often don't have as much deep experience in critical areas needed for growth. Usually, the founding team is still learning and evolving their skills and depth of knowledge in the domain. This is good in the beginning when things are moving quickly, as you need flexible leaders who can quickly learn in new environments. But as you scale, you begin needing expertise and depth as well.

Here are three key questions I ask leaders facing the challenge of how to evolve and plan their professional development. These will not only help the business create the best leadership team; they will help keep people engaged and motivated throughout the growth process.

1. What drives engagement?

The first question to ask yourself is: What do you really enjoy doing that keeps you engaged and continuously challenges you? It's more than just liking something. You need to really be compelled and driven to get better at it over time to be able to maintain your focus over the long term.

Write down all of the tasks and work that you do. Now think about when and how you engage in that work. Find the three to five things that you notice a high degree of engagement in. Look for periods where you lose track of time or tend to push off other tasks, or even things like eating, to spend more time doing. Find those activities where you're totally engrossed in the work and forget about everything else.

If you can't find any obvious activities, find the ones that you have the most curiosity about and start carving out a little more time and focus to get into them and notice what happens. Does your curiosity increase or do you get bored quickly and want to move on?

2. What are you really good at?

It's not enough to just enjoy something. You need to be good at it too in order to create value. Something you love doing that you're not proficient at is a hobby, not a profession. Look for things where you get lots of positive feedback and things that people ask you to do frequently. If you can, get more feedback from colleagues and bosses about what they see as valuable skills and contributions. You don't need to be a world expert on something, but you want to be seen as having a high degree of skill and performance.

Focus on what other people think you're really good at, not just your own assessment. Sometimes, we know too much and are too self-critical. You may feel like you don't really know what you're doing, or know that there is so much more to learn, but someone not educated in the field may see you as brilliant. It's more about what others think, not just what you think.

3. What can nobody else do?

Finally, you need to look for the things that nobody else can do like you can. If everyone else is also going at something, there is little room for differentiation or to be seen as a unique resource. You want to find something that you enjoy, that you're good at, AND that nobody else can do.

If you can't find anything truly unique off-hand, start looking for ways you can add or combine skills and experiences to create a valuable and unique capability. Maybe you're really good at contract law, minored in environmental studies in college, and are a hobbyist rock collector. Can you combine them to focus on contracts involving public land use for mining and forestry?

Developing a niche is an excellent way to become highly sought-after and highly compensated. Don't be afraid to really carve out a unique domain; just make sure there are at least a handful of people and companies who really need that expertise.

Becoming a high-achieving executive is about creating unique and desirable value in your market. Focusing on these three questions will help you find something you're not just passionate about, but something that you can create a real niche around. As they say, the riches are in the niches.