Bottom Line Business Insights : Maryland Business Lawyer & Attorney : Wagonheim Law Firm : Mergers & Acquisitions & Contractual Negotiation

After I turned 40 (quite some time ago), I realized that my fantasies had changed. The fantasy goes like this: 

One day, I’ll leave my office and check into a hotel. I will tell no one where I’ve gone. I will turn off my cell phone and be completely inaccessible. My wife will simply think I’m at the office. My office will, of course, simply think that I’m at a meeting. But I’ll be shacked up in a hotel instead. 

And for the rest of the day, and perhaps into the night, whether I watch mindless television or check out the hotel pool, I’ll do precisely nothing.

I have recorded data, but were I to hazard a guess, I’d say that 90% of the most important, top-level planning I’ve done for this firm has been accomplished outside of work hours. I crystallized our mission and wrote a good portion of the 2011 business plan while on a six hour layover in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport in the summer of 2010. Our Empty Hourglass Program was born in a hotel lobby in Fort Lauderdale. Our mobile app? That can trace its origins back to a GameStop with my kids in Shrewsbury, PA. I see these examples as neither accident nor coincidence. 

I was recently introduced to Mike Brooks, a person of achievement and insight, who happens to be an extremely accomplished financial planner. He told me, and I hope I’m not speaking out of school by revealing one of his bedrock principles, that he has a quarterly “retreat” (my word, not his) hardwired into his calendar. It could be a week, it could be a long weekend, but regardless, it always constitutes a break from his day-to-day business routines. 

Why? 

Because of the Dallas/Fort Worth layover. Because of the Fort Lauderdale hotel lobby. Because of the Shrewsbury GameStop.

Too many business owners become overwhelmed by the trees to contemplate a view of the forest. Whether it is concern about keeping the lights on, meeting payroll, or just over-commitment, the possibility of a day or two reserved to contemplate the business as a whole remains…well…a fantasy.

For myself, however, I resolved – perhaps a bit too early for a New Year’s resolution – that I will not rest on the hope that my next big idea will come to me unbidden in the Dallas airport. Instead, I plan to follow a well-considered example and hard wire some time for innovation. 

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“So, what’s your 5 year target?”

My client responded quickly: “$7,000,000 gross revenue in 5 years.”

“OK, so let’s drill down. What is your average salesperson generating now and what kind of inside staff do you need to support each outside salesperson?”

The answer was sobering. Eight new sales people, five new inside people, two more warehouse people and one administrative person – 16 new hires overall -- would be needed to reach the company’s 5 year goal. This would come close to doubling the size of my client’s company. The answer was sobering not because it couldn’t be done; but rather because he’d never actually sat down and done the math. 

Having arrived at a picture of what the company would look like in 2016, we then began to trace the steps we would need to get there. In other words, we had to figure out what 2012 would look like:

• How many people she would need to hire;
• What kind of business would have to be brought in to support them; and
• The sales and marketing effort necessary to bring in the requisite business.

This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and to explain why, I have to give you a little window into the business of practicing law.

Ask any business lawyer (any lawyer, really, other than a personal injury, bankruptcy, or tax relief attorney) and he or she will tell you that business comes in by referral. “We don’t advertise,” is the typical refrain. 

Well, that’s true. Neither do we. But at the end of 2008, I realized something. I realized that when I point to referrals as my marketing strategy, I was really doing nothing other than crossing my fingers and hoping that the phone rang the next day with the right person at the other end of the line. I had no plan. And when I asked myself how I was going to make the next year better than the one that was just ending, I had no plan other than…well…prayer.

So I changed things. I made marketing a priority and, more importantly, made a number of significant improvements to how we do things and what we offer so that we could tell the story I wanted to be able to tell. After all, what good is it to stand on a soapbox and broadcast the same, tired message? In my view, if you’re going to invest in a bullhorn, you damn well better have something to say. 

For our part, we:

• Introduced the blog you’re reading now (now in our second year) to focus on exactly what our name says – Bottom Line Business Insights;
• Started an e-mail series offering insights into business philosophy, best practices, and legal issues that now reaches over 1,200 business owners per week;
• Introduced the non-billable hour Empty Hourglass® Program to make client communications effortless, without limit, and free of charge;
• Produced the Business Owner’s Pocket Guide and the new Commercial Real Estate Pocket Guide for clients and friends of the firm…free of charge;
• Developed our first-of-its-kind interactive business diagnostic, BizRX for download on PC, iTunes, Blackberry and Android; and,
• Beginning last week, began sending weekly interactive mind map pdfs to each of our clients offering status updates and highlighting priority issues…at no charge.

While there are more changes to come, we have traveled a long road in the past 3 years to get beyond hope as our primary growth strategy. We have a plan, target numbers to hit, and initiatives we can point to as a basis for projecting growth. 

Over the next few weeks, in our e-mail series, I will be delving into key business building insights from some of the best business growth consultants in the region and in the country.  I will also be discussing this in more depth in our free upcoming webinar. If you have not yet signed up for one (or both), now’s the time. 

I’m hoping that blog posts like this one and our newest e-mail series may inspire you to do more than just jot down projections. I’m hoping that they inspire you to commit on paper to a way of attaining them. And of course, if I can be of any help, please contact me. That’s what I’m here for.

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[Listen Online]

I was sad when I learned Farrah Fawcett had died. In my youth, she was a symbol borne of an iconic poster, great hair, and a really bad TV show. Princess Diana had that smile. The death of each (and many other notables) make you pause. If you’re a business owner, the death of Steve Jobs made you think.

The difference is akin to the divide between a good movie and a great one. A good movie will make you think back on great scenes and smile. A great move stays with you. It may even alter your perspective.

The business life of Steve Jobs was a great movie.

I’ll leave the litany of achievements to others. I want to focus on the lessons. There are others, but I’ll mention three that every entrepreneur should adopt as a mantra:

1. Clarity of purpose. Why do you do what you do? What makes you…you? If someone could take your logo from your restaurant, law firm, or landscaping company, slide someone else’s in there and there would be no difference, you’re doing something wrong. 
   
   
2. Discipline of how you do it. Once you figure out who you are, it must permeate everything you do in a way that’s true to your vision. I mean everything from your office space to how you advertise job openings.
   
   
3. Consistency. Your brand must transcend your products or current offerings. Can anyone doubt that Apple achieved this?

You see, his passing notwithstanding, the last thing Steve Jobs would want an entrepreneur, innovator, brand manager or business owner to do is rest.

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Tim Robbins opined that there were two types of people: Those who, upon hearing that a storm is coming, simply pray that it passes them by, and those who prepare for it. The Shawshank Redemption

It’s no secret what the smart Maryland businesses should be doing.

A recent Baltimore Sun article expresses the view that it’s no time to panic, that Maryland enjoyed a surge of federal spending of late and that the cuts explored thus far are just returning us to 2007 levels – hardly a wholesale slaughter. However, I think that’s a small consolation to businesses who’ve hired over the past 4+ years to keep up with the workload. It sure isn’t any consolation to the families of employees who may be on the chopping block.

I think businesses need to do more than just console themselves.

Businesses need to retool – position themselves for work in the private sector or even overseas and it must be the business of the State of Maryland and our own community of entrepreneurs and educational institutions to help them.

And in contemplating that, my mind naturally turns to…healthcare.

We all know that healthcare costs have soared out of control; technology, an endless line of specialists for any given ailment, medication, malpractice insurance…all of it. But in all of this, there has been one radical change of perspective that has been dramatically successful in reducing costs – wellness visits; the thought that the medical profession should emphasize prevention rather than just react to problems.

I’d write the same prescription for Maryland businesses. Now is the time for the City, State, and Maryland’s private businesses to implement programs to help businesses reposition themselves for a different kind of competition, for a different kind of customer. 

I’m not urging the State or City to come out with financial incentives – the businesses already have a big one. But, I am urging the State and City to play a leadership role. The risk of doing nothing, in the path of the oncoming storm, is that we’ll look around at the wreckage of higher unemployment and a diminishing tax base and wonder why we didn’t better prepare.

How should we prepare?

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