The Executive Suite

Tuesday, May 5, 2020

How to Stop Micromanaging Your Employees

One of the most common struggles a new leader faces is learning to delegate and let go of the “little things.” While you may feel like you need constant oversight into your team’s work, micromanaging employees damages morale and drives away your top performers. It also prevents your team from doing truly creative or innovative work.

Part of solving this problem requires establishing healthy communication routines with your team members or leads. The rest comes down to gaining—and keeping—their trust. To help you break any micromanagement tendencies, we asked members of YEC Next this question:

Q. What is one way to encourage leaders to stop micromanaging?

1. Focus on better communication

Micromanagers worry that if they let things proceed with just a little less control on their part, the team won’t get it done. The necessary trust can be formed by encouraging better communication between leaders and their teams. If employees freely communicate and share their progress, managers can feel more secure knowing that work is getting done without their micromanagement. —Michael Miglio, ICO Law Group

2. Prioritize time for yourself

Time is a limited resource and you only have so much of it in a day. You can do more if you create more time for yourself. If you micromanage your team, they will always need you for everything and you will never have time. However, empowering your team and working through them will help them to learn and grow. It may take a year or two, but if the team has the desire, they will come to you less. —Shawn Byrne, My Biz Niche

3. Force your team to come up with their own solutions

It’s hard to let go of your “baby” but it has to be done. You have to trust your team that they will care as much as you do, and put in the same effort you would on a given task or project. It may not always happen, but it’s a learning experience that both parties can benefit from. If you force people to come up with their own solutions, by design you’ll be forced to micromanage less. —Matthew Gibson, Flewid Inc.

4. Encourage people to manage up

Leaders often micromanage because they lack sufficient knowledge about the project. Have employees ask their manager if they have a preferred method for being informed and then apply that preferred method to keep the communications channels open. For example, providing managers with a weekly update report could be all it takes to help them feel more confident that team members are on task and will meet the requirements. —Reb Risty, REBL Marketing

5. Focus on ‘firing yourself’

Whether you are the leader yourself or have a team of managers, getting leaders to focus on “firing themselves” is critical. Leading from this perspective means you’re doing your job right, coaching and empowering employees to succeed. Operating from a leadership position that trains and coaches your team to function without you is literally the opposite of micromanagement and hence prevents such behavior. —Jason Keyz, Keyz Group, Inc

6. Remind yourself that micromanaging isn’t good leadership

When leaders get the notion that they aren’t being good leaders when they micromanage, they tend to back off a little. Once a person in a leadership role steps back and can see their employees being successful, they will realize that it isn’t necessary to micromanage them 100 percent of the time. People with a tendency to micromanage will lose employees faster. —Ajmal Saleem, Suprex Learning

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Sunday, May 3, 2020

How to Create an Integrated Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

Too many small businesses make a common mistake when it comes to their marketing efforts. Are you one of them? You are if you separate your marketing efforts into silos. Sure, you have marketing plans for your business and/or website that may (should) include search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, content marketing, mobile solutions, SMS (text) marketing, voice search, video, events, and social media, but often they’re independent of one another.

This may sound simplistic, but your marketing should not be siloed. You need a holistic, integrated, cohesive marketing strategy that connects your various marketing channels and platforms.
How do you develop an integrated marketing plan?

Step 1. Define your customer

Do you really know who your ideal customer is? There are so many factors that go into the profile of your ideal customer, including demographics (age, gender, level of education, race, income, where they live, relationship status, if they have kids, etc.) and psychographics (which looks at characteristics like emotions, values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices).

Take this information and craft a customer profile or buyer persona. Once you have a better idea of who your customer is and what motivates them, it’ll be easier to create marketing campaigns that connect with them.

Step 2. Define your objectives

The objective of marketing is not just to sell stuff. Marketing helps you:

Build brand awareness.
Explain and inform what you do and how you do it.
Attract customers.
Form relationships and alliances.
Increase sales.
Improve customer engagement.

This contributes to the most important reason businesses market themselves: to build trust among customers.

That’s your overall goal. But you need to have incremental goals, which can include the elements previously listed, or others, such as expanding into new markets, attracting strategic partners, launching a new product/service, etc.

Once you identify what you’re hoping to accomplish, create a realistic plan that is specific to that goal and measurable. It’s not good enough to say, “I want more customers to come to my restaurant.” Instead, perhaps you want to attract more families on the weekends.

Step 3. Conduct smart marketing

At this point you should know whom you’re targeting, what message you’re sending, and how you plan to reach your customers. Not all marketing channels are equally effective. But if you craft the right message to the right channel, your chances of success will be higher. Delivering a consistent message is important to building your brand, but you can swap out photo assets and some wording to more finely target your intended audiences.

If you’re driving consumers to sign up for your email list, it’s smart to send them to landing pages where the marketing message is amplified.

This is where the integrated approach comes into play. Siloed marketing efforts might involve multiple marketing channels, but the efforts are not coordinated or integrated. They don’t cross promote. Think about how much more effective your marketing would be, for example, if you amplified your direct mail messages with a follow-up email marketing campaign.

Step 4. Measure and repeat

Another mistake small businesses often make is not measuring the results of their marketing efforts. All the social platforms offer some type of analytics. So does your search engine. There are third-party tools that also offer analytics. And of course your marketing should include some type of measurement device, like A/B testing. Experiment with splitting test subject lines, email designs, templates, images, body copy, call-to-action text, and so much more. It can make all the difference in your email marketing efforts.

See what works and what doesn’t and use that knowledge to inform your marketing as you go forward.

Crucial elements of marketing

Social media usage has skyrocketed.

For a medium that didn’t exist 20 years ago, social media is now ubiquitous. According to Hootsuite, 82% of North Americans are active social media users.

Once you establish your social presence, create a company social media policy. What will you talk about? What do your clients and customers want and/or expect from you? Who will manage your social platforms? How often will you post? Consistency is key to achieving your goals. Remember, social media works by getting other people to amplify your message.
Direct mail is hot again

Direct mail is making a comeback. Why? One reason is, ironically, trust. Younger consumers—millennials and zoomers (Gen Z)—don’t necessarily associate direct mail with “junk mail” the way older consumers do. The younger generation doesn’t receive a lot of actual mail, so sending physical mail is a way to stand out from the crowd.

But, as novel as it is, direct mail alone is not nearly as effective as it can be if you couple it with email marketing. MediaPost suggests starting with a direct mail message and following up a week later with email. It also recommends sending two emails for every piece of direct mail you send.

You can make direct mail part of your automated marketing campaigns by setting up triggers to send direct mail after a prospect takes certain actions, just as you would with a drip email campaign. Both the email and the direct mail piece should use the same design elements and messaging to reinforce your brand and your offer.

Email remains king

As we’ve already alluded to, no integrated marketing campaign will work without a healthy dose of email marketing. According to stats compiled by 99firms.com:
80% of marketers claim email is best for customer acquisition.
Email marketing has a $44 ROI for every $1 spent.
Global email users will hit 4.3 billion by 2023.
Email is the preferred promotion channel for 60% of consumers.

Underscoring these stats, eMarketer reports more than 90% of internet users regularly send email, “making it one of the most common digital activities in the U.S.” And “data from the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) indicates checking email is the most common activity on PCs as well as mobile apps.”

If you want your marketing to be truly effective, take the time to craft an integrated marketing approach. It may take you a little more time, but the payoff will be worth it.

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Saturday, May 2, 2020

The Executive Suite: How to Find an Angel Investor for Your Startup

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Key considerations for every physician before acquiring a practice

Deciding whether to buy your own practice is among the biggest financial decisions a physician or team of doctors will make over the course of a career in medicine.

When assessing a potential acquisition, a physician should research and fully assess all aspects of the targeted medical practice, notably: patient volume, timeliness of patient bill paying, condition of facilities and equipment, revenue and growth potential, location, economic health of the market, and recent sale prices of comparable operations, among others.

First things first: As the novel coronavirus impacts much of the United States, we recommend that acquisitive doctors temporarily move to the sidelines and wait for public health and economic conditions to stabilize. A wide range of preventative care visits and elective procedures are currently on hold, distorting the financial picture of many practices and making it difficult to assess a practice’s true worth and realistic outlook.

When the economic climate steadies, there will surely be opportunities. Demand for health care continues to steadily march upward as the population ages and medical advances drive continuously improving treatments and medications, adding to the appeal of ownership. At the same time, more doctors who own practices are nearing retirement age and likely will consider sales. Nearly a third of all doctors are between the ages of 55 and 65, according to data provider Statista, accounting for a larger share than any other age group.

When the time comes, physicians should seek answers to these important questions as they examine the financial merits of a potential acquisition:

What are the total costs and the most substantial expense drivers?
Are these costs expected to climb in coming years and by how much?
Are near-term upgrades to facilities and equipment needed?
Will existing staff stay on and at what cost?
How much revenue does the practice generate in a month and in a year? Does it cover all expenses by a healthy margin?
What are the principal drivers of revenue? Are there potential new sources of income?
What is the composition of the patient base? Is it growing?
Does the practice’s accounts receivable aging report – a record that shows unpaid invoice balances and the duration for which they’ve been outstanding – show that an acceptable level of patients paying bills in timely fashion?
Is the practice located in an economically healthy market? Is its population growth?
Does the practice have strong market share? How competitive is the market?
And, of course: How does the asking price stack up against recent, comparable sales in the market?

The answers to these questions will also help a buyer decide if the practice is a good investment. Often, a buyer will need a loan to finance and close a deal. An experienced banker should be well-positioned to provide counsel on potential acquisitions. A banker with significant experience in health care lending and knowledge of the market’s dynamics can both add value to decision-making and ensure fitting loan options.

An important part of the loan application process is a determination of how much a buyer can confidently borrow. This is based both on the borrower’s personal financial situation and the expected success of the practice.

A banker will need the following from the buying physician to help determine this:

A statement of assets and liabilities
Last three years of tax filings
Resume
Medical license

And from the owner of the targeted practice, a banker will need to see:

Three years of tax returns
A comprehensive practice evaluation—patient base, revenue, demographics, competition
Productivity by health care provider
An updated accounts receivable aging report

For all the near-term challenges imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, there is an abundance of reason to believe physician practices will thrive over the long haul—most notably increasing demand for ever-improving care.

U.S. health spending is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.4 percent between 2019 and 2028, reaching $6.2 trillion by the final year of that window, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The CMS projects that health expenditures will on average grow more than 1 percentage point faster per year than overall gross domestic product in that span of time, and it estimates health care’s share of the national economic pie will rise about two percentage points to 19.7 percent by 2028.

Clearly, patience is required in the near team. But there is little doubt that opportunity lies ahead for owners—and would-be owners—of physician practices.