Independent Strategic Partners for high potential individuals and businesses 952.937.8687
Making Money Doing Nothing!
Sound too good to be true? Doesn’t have to be ~ What I’m referring to is tracking your business virtually using “web-based reporting.”
The beauty of this is, you can do it from ANYWHERE ~
Holding your management team accountable for results yields far greater returns when you can monitor trends in short intervals rather than waiting for month end financials.
Web-based reporting systems offer users easy access to tracking individual and total company performance in real-time. Web-based tracking includes statistics such as:
Labor
Sales
Expenses
Customer satisfaction
You can program your reports with variances that will highlight in red when the business is performing under goal and green when performing above goal. You can sort your data by:
Brand
Product Classification
Management Level
Geography
Ownership
Etc.
Accountability with real-time performance tracking not only keeps you financially up to date, but it also can help you target management issues before the losses are too great. Variable expenses, for example, that stay at budget even though sales are down would be flagged. Addressing these concerns to accommodate increasing or decreasing sales might not only impact your bottom-line but also your customer satisfaction.
Tip: Speedy Memo's
Accountability actually has two masters: the delegator and the delegatee. We often forget this. It’s easy to dish out direction and then walk away assuming that the task will get done. Unfortunately, it rarely does.
Giving direction without follow-up is like blowing bubbles into the air, eventually they just go away. Here’s a quick tip to help both of you remember and prioritize. Speedy memo’s....
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Remember those old fashioned carbonless copy memos from the ‘70’s? Well, they still have a use. There are electronic versions which work as well, but only if both of you are technology savvy. (Don’t assume everyone is.) The idea is to make 3 copies of each request: one for the delegatee, one for yourself, and one anyone else who may be involved.
Then, once a week pull out your file of delegated tasks and simply, follow-up. Some tasks will be done, others will be in progress, but this way both you and your team will be visually motivated to stay on task!
How to motivate each type...
Pleasure seekers:
Offer incentives that are attractive to them…you can determine this by simply listening to them talk---pleasure seekers love to talk about the things that bring them joy…food, time-off, money, concerts, etc.
Create positive emotion around the reward…perhaps sending “teasers” when milestones are reached…Pain avoiders will simply poo-poo all this as marketing fluff…
Pain avoiders:
State painful consequences that you know they try to avoid such as staying late, losing privileges or being documented… (You have to be careful to not be threatening---that’s different---but disappointment is very painful for this group and can be used in a non-threatening way)
Create negative emotion around the consequences… (Dieters, for example, who are motivated by pain often keep themselves going with negative associations, such as “When I’m overweight I don’t get dates,” etc.)…
Mix of both:When trying to create team accountability, design both rewards and consequences into the plan… Those that want the pleasure won’t even care about the consequences as they will be so driven to get the prize ~ Those that want to avoid the pain will focus on how to avoid the consequences regardless if they want to “win a new car” or whatever is the prize…