The Professor of On-Purpose
Listen to Kevin W. McCarthy’s interview about Finding Your Purpose in Business and Life.
Join Kevin as he is interviewed by Ryan Tansom of Life After Business.
Learn what it means to build a company of leaders. Discover where entrepreneurs go off course when it comes to identifying and sticking to their purpose.
The interview is approximately 60 minutes.
(This video mentions the year 2010. No matter the year, having a September plan is good for your business.)
Many of us are just returning from vacation and others are just getting ready to close out the summer by heading on vacation. We’re executing on our family and personal plans put in place some months ago. Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?
Image via Wikipedia
It isn’t like New Year’s Day, but in a sense it can function much like it because it gives us the opportunity to finish the year strong. September is a time to reboot the business.
From now until New Year’s Eve is a great stretch to really make strides in your career or business.
With just a couple of weeks left in August, let’s get our heads ahead of the game and start making plans today for September through the remainder of the year.
Plan now and you’ll hit September in full stride and have the momentum to carry you through the fall and into the first days of winter.
In polite company, we’re told not to discuss religion, sex, or money. So today, I’m not discussing sex!
God is being used in the broadest possible terms without affiliation to a particular denomination, faith, or point of view. I’m using God as inclusive of your worldview even if you’re an agnostic.
You may call God Nature, The Life Force, The Trinity, Jesus, Abba, Spirit, Jehovah, The Big Bang, or some other point of origin for the planet and our lives on it. In other words, unless you are a hard core atheist, don’t be offended.
Trust, not God, is the focus of the OP Minute. If you are searching for purpose, then you can’t avoid the spiritual nature of your quest and the need to trust that something bigger than you exists. Sure it raises important questions that profoundly affect our lives and color our worldview.
Do This: Grab a piece of paper and invest 60 seconds to jot down your answers to these questions:
God (broadly referenced remember) is bigger than we are. God is present today and around tomorrow. Long after we die, God exists. God is humbling and continuous. There’s something undeniably bigger than us, and God is a widely accepted term for that something.
When I go to the ocean, I often think of the sound of the waves crashing on the beach as the heartbeat of God. We can close our ears, minds, and hearts to the presence of God, but we can’t stop the waves from beating the shores. And we can’t stop those waves from pulsing on our hearts.
Money, while nice to have, is a store of value but a counterfeit store of trust. If you’ll accept my premise about money, then where do you place your trust? Repeat this cycle of asking yourself where is the basis of your trust.
Honest repetition of the cycle eventually peels back the layers of empty stores to reveal God. Yet God is more concept than concrete. It defies logic to trust a mere concept. Yet, the mystery of God’s presence for as long as you can remember becomes undeniable. Something is there that our minds alone can’t grasp. And now we’re being asked to trust it more than we do when driving through an intersection with a green light. Weird, huh? Wonderful, yes!
That source of it all is why “In God We Trust” is such an important reminder of what matters most even as we wisely earn, save, and invest money.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
At a client management roundtable I facilitated, the participants emphasized the lack of direction and communication. Their sentiments were echoed and validated by an employee survey. When asked to perform a financial assessment on the cost of poor communication and direction, within two minutes these leaders had calculated over $12 million in costs or 25% of the company’s gross revenues.
Through the years I’ve invited clients to assess the cost of being off-purpose. Consistently, it is a breathtaking percentage of revenues. Here’s why: every line item on the financial statements is affected. The effect, however, is mostly indirect so the true cost is out of sight on the typical performance metrics.
Broadly insufficient direction and communication reflect on the top leaders. Experience tells me it isn’t that the top leaders won’t direct or communicate, it is that they don’t know what to communicate.
Purpose, vision, missions, and values form the basis of core strategy that informs the business plan. Generalities instead of strategic clarity muddy direction and communication. When the leadership and management team are fuzzy, then the supervisory and frontline people are left guessing what to do.
Interestingly, those who “guess” better than most, get promoted. They imagine being in management will give them the opportunity to manage better than they were managed. In fact, they soon discover they’re just closer to the source of the problem and are even more exposed to the risks of managing through the mud. This can lead to a feeling of being squeezed between upper management and frontline workers.
On one hand, one wants to be loyal to their employer; yet, on the other hand, it is really hard to defend dumb policies and procedures with no basis of strategy or logic. In top management’s defense (to some degree), it is a fine line to walk between leading and managing versus dictating and micromanaging.
If you are the CEO, figure out your strategy and direction and commit yourself and your team to being true to it. Sell it consistently with great internal communication and reward right behaviors.
One of the great movie lines of all time comes from the movie Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman. The chain gang prison captain says to Luke after rendering a whipping on him, “What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate.” Watch Video.
Indeed, we do have … failure to communicate. Imagine being in my shoes and seeing huge gains and savings to be had in a business, yet the leader is out of the comfort of his or her experience or they assume they are communicating.
Purpose is the beginning of clarity in life and business. It pays big dividends to be on-purpose.
Profit-making has a bad rap.
Truth be told, greed is an attitude of the heart that is often revealed in business but isn’t inherent to being in business.
If your heart’s desire is to truly be of service to others, then greed is likely not going to be your problem. Your challenge is just the opposite—you run so far from the appearances of greed that you overdeliver and undercharge so often that your business is hanging by a thread. Check your mindset and see if I’m right!
This On-Purpose Business Minute may be just the message you need to hear to awaken you that it isn’t your marketing, sales force, or operations that needs the adjustment—it is your internal posture about profits in need of repair.
Customer service is first an attitude before it is a behavior. Too often we focus on creating excellent customer service skills but we neglect the well-being and perspective of the person delivering it. How a customer is treated makes all the difference to their impression, experience, and promotion—yes, promotion—of your business.
Treat your customers right—first, because it is the right thing to do in a civil society. Second, treat them right because it is really smart business.
Do you have a concerted effort to improve the customer experience? If not, why not?
But does it really? Long before the customer relationship begins the top leaders of the organization hire the employees, set the standards, make investments, train managers, and create training programs.
The front-line employee is an easy target when things go wrong with customer service complaints. Admittedly, the front-line person does have a high responsibility. The fact is customer service improvement is a joint effort unified and girded by the strength of personal leadership across the entire team.
If your customer service levels have plateaued below your standards, then consider that you might have a systemic problem rather than a people challenge. Look to your business strategy, departmental cooperation, hiring, technology, training, or any number of issues under the purview of the “Customer Service” department.
Customer service skills training may provide a quick fix, but it is rarely a long-term improvement in the customer experience.
Watch this On-Purpose Minute, “Do Good Manners Matter?” about the importance of manners and the Ritz-Carlton approach to serving “ladies and gentlemen.” Having recently stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead, GA I can tell you that this approach remains alive and well.
If you lead the company, you may need an assessment and recommendation to shift your corporate culture toward customer service excellence. We also offer one-on-one executive coaching as well as training and development programs designed to help your team members become TOP Performers and excellent in their customer service. Email us to arrange an appointment.
Profits are the lifeblood of any business. Without them, the business dies. However, the body of the business is your strategy, structure, and systems that are organized and managed in such a way that profit is the natural outcome.
It is so easy to get focused on managing to a profit that we forget the body of profit creation. Avoid falling into the pit of managing numbers and forgetting that profits are the result of a team of people being well led and organized to serve a customer base with sufficient value to produce a profit.
Your profit and loss report makes a statement about what matters most in your business leadership. “Follow the money!” was the advice of Deep Throat, the Watergate secret informer. Following the money reveals much about the priorities of the business leaders and managers.
Your definition of profit frames your leadership and management methods. If net profit is only about the dollars and cents, then your cost of doing business is likely too high because you’ll have high turnover of team members and customers. Profitability is a financial as well as a human measure for adding and creating value. Ignore either one and your P&L will suffer. Invest in both and you’ve increased your probabilities for profiting.
Yes, financial profits matter. Integrating people and profits is the role of leadership and management, respectively. So how are you doing?
In the long run, your business’s valuation will reflect the attitude and excellence of the corporate culture you’re establishing. Short-term fixes (coupons and discounts) to stimulate profits are drug-like highs and can often undermine or compromise the core values of a business. This sends your best employees scurrying to the doors because it signals leadership panic plus a loss of stability and commitment to the people and brand promise.
Note: The On-Purpose Business Experience is now called ONPURPOSE@WORK. We don’t have any scheduled yet for 2017.
Business innovation and re-invention have sex appeal. Shoring up your market niche, refining your business processes, honing your marketing, improving your understanding of your customers’ needs, and becoming a world class expert demand hard work, attention to detail, and faith—in other words, not so sexy!
Business innovation is a great concept, yet in execution, I’ve generally seen that most businesses innovate and reorganize out of weakness and 
boredom instead of strength and passion. That means they’re fixing what’s broken and calling it innovation when in fact the fundamentals weren’t in place as is. Hopping from idea to idea is symptomatic of an unsettled and non-strategic business owner prone to chasing squirrels or shiny new objects.
Have you gotten caught up in the frenzied strategy and talk of business innovation and re-invention? Innovation and re-invention make for sound bites, but they just don’t replace a good old-fashioned ethic of working hard, caring for the customer, rewarding the employees, and creating a better value at a better price that focuses on serving people extraordinarily well. Yet, capitalism works!
Small business owners—in particular—are susceptible to the allure of innovation and re-invention. I’ve advised far too many business owners over the years whose “grass is always greener” mentality prevents them from benefiting from years, sometimes decades, of investment and effort to build a business. I have yet to find a small business that couldn’t be improved by at least 10% if it just stopped talking about itself and actually marketed itself in its customers’ self-interest.
I believe everyone is a leader of something. It starts with their own life and radiates outward from there. I also believe that everyone has genius designed into them where they are amazing experts.
I’m an Apple Mac fan. When you walk into an Apple retail store you’ll discover the Genius Bar where you can get help with your Apple purchases. Apple gets that people have a genius about them so why not get help from fellow geniuses?
Here’s an example from our local community. A few years ago Judith, my wife, and I walked Hamlet (our dog) to the Winter Park Farmers Market to browse and get some fresh vegetables. There was a gentleman, Mike Mannix, selling homemade organic vanilla bean extract. I asked Mike how he got involved with starting his business. Mike unraveled an amazing and romantic notion of vanilla beans in history, how they are cultivated and harvested in a few places in the world, and why vanilla beans were so expensive and special. Wow! Talk about a passion for his product. Mike may be one of the top 100 experts in the world in vanilla beans. Does it matter? To me, he was the #1 expert in the world. I trusted his expertise within 5 minutes of meeting him. Order from Mike at Mannix Vanilla.
You can be that same specialist in your business or industry—the person who is highly regarded by peers and customers alike for your expertise. Follow your passion, be odd, look crazy, see the world differently, be yourself, trust your instincts, make a difference!
Hey, look at me! I am the #1 expert in the world in helping people be on-purpose. That isn’t boasting; that’s quiet confidence because I’ve been at this since the late 1980s. I’m shoring up my business to go deep in order to help this message go more places.
How much more innovation and re-invention do you need? If you love what you do, then double down your efforts, pay attention to the details, and become a better marketer. Learn how to sell. The rest will take care of itself.
Great tool: How do you go deep? In The On-Purpose Business Person, you’ll find The Service Model. Here is a method and model that will help you to look below the obvious front line of your business to get to the depth of building a sustainable and profitable business. For less than a couple of bucks, you can gain access to this tool and built-in instructions all on one page. Imagine having your entire business strategy and plan laid out on one page!
Use this tool to rapidly think through, structure, and show the relationship of the different hats you wear as the head of a business or a career. By the way, every job is actually a solo owner business!