Creating New Rituals and Habits

Happy New Year! Many of us make resolutions for healthy habits this time of year, but really any time you make a life change – such as getting a new job, having a baby or retiring – is the perfect opportunity to reassess not just your daily routine, but also your regular habits and rituals. What changes do you want to make in your life? What has worked well for you and what might you like to be different? Now is the time to decide: Do you want to sleep in until 7am? Do you want to cook healthy meals? Work out before lunch instead of 5:15am? Do you want to buy tickets to the theater for a Wednesday night because you don’t have to worry about the alarm clock waking you on Thursday morning? Do you want to take a class at the community college that meets from 2pm to 4pm on Mondays? Or do you want to create a habit for reading, journaling, walking, biking, coffee with friends?

Decide what habits and rituals you want and then set up a place to do it. Ensure your tools of the trade are handy and then build the time into your schedule using a trigger that indicates when it’s time to do it. For instance, if you want to read your Bible every day, create a place to read, put your bible and any other tools in that space (reading glasses, a pointer, a coaster for your cup of coffee), and then build the trigger into your schedule. If you want to read right after you make your morning cup of joe, that’s your trigger. This year, as my schedule changed, I set a resolution to write in my journal every day. I created a space at a table in my home office, placed my journal, reading glasses and pen on the table, and my trigger alerts me to journal right before I head downstairs for breakfast. If you want to eat healthy meals, where will you find or create those meals? What tools do you need to do it well? What will trigger you to create or find those meals instead of the traditional fast food you’ve been relying upon?

You don’t need a life change to create healthy good habits. Pick something small and get started today.

Good luck!

How to Transfer Your Most Important Relationships to Your Successor

Your chosen successor has many wonderful strengths and experiences that he or she will bring to your business. But there’s one thing they lack: the depth and breadth of the relationships you have invested years building and maintaining. They will never be just like you in those relationships and they cannot start with the level of connections you have with your key vendors, customers and employees.

This is a huge concern for a lot of owners because they have been the company’s primary external relationship builders, especially with really significant accounts.

So how do you transition them?

You need to identify what is most valuable or important about your relationships with each of your external connections. Is it the ability to negotiate a win-win? An abiding commitment to shared risk? Or the ability to get to the right person at their company quickly to resolve an issue? If you know what is most valuable, you can set up a plan to pass that along to your successor or another appropriate person within your company.

If you are the company’s top salesperson, things get a little trickier. If your successor won’t be picking up the responsibility for sales, you’ll need to prepare your sales team to pick up the slack, and ensure that your successor is prepared to appropriately support key sales calls.

As you engage in these external meetings, insist on bringing your successor with you. If you are renegotiating a banking agreement or vendor agreement, establishing a new vendor/customer, or sitting down with your CPA for an annual business review, bring them along. Discuss your objectives in advance. Talk about the relationship dynamics, the history of the partnership, the areas you will be working on in that particular meeting.

By inviting them along, they learn so much about your priorities, the relationships you have, the way you handle the meetings, the issues, challenges and opportunities that exist. After each meeting, take time to do a focused debrief and coach them on what you were trying to accomplish and assess the effectiveness together. Use it not only to help them learn, but ask them for input, insight and ideas. They offer fresh perspective and will likely surprise you with new ways of thinking or partnering. Some of it will probably be very useful and directly applicable.

Look for opportunities to get your successor involved in annual events such as your year-end audit or regular tax filing too, so they don’t have to face it for the first time without you. Those internal systems that interact with external relationships are also important to plan for.

Over time, you will have to attend these meetings and be intimately involved in the systems less frequently, and your successor will be in a position to handle more and more.

For one of my clients, the board relationship was really important. The successor didn’t have much of a relationship with the board, which would be guiding and directing his work, but it was critical. They needed to be able to influence and support each other.

Our task was to establish the necessary credibility and rapport so they could call on each other as needed. We brought the successor in to the board meetings and gave him targeted responsibilities that increased over time. We then directed him to meet one-on-one with board members outside the meeting to learn how the board saw the company, its CEO, his role as successor and the risks and growth areas in the business. This all facilitated a deeper relationship. We also had him join the audit committee to penetrate that aspect of the business and work with several key board members in a small group setting.

You’re probably asking the age-old question now: My gosh, how long does this relationship transition take? Depending on the uniqueness, length and complexity of these relationships – as well as how comfortable you are with letting go – you can expect it to take from three to nine months to establish and it could be years before it’s fully in place at the level of the relationships you’ve built. Of course yours weren’t built in 6 months either!

While we’ve been focusing on the importance of transferring external relationships, don’t forget about facilitating the relationship transfer between your successor and the employees who get the work done day in and day out. People such as your administrative assistant, controller/CFO, operational team leaders and department heads, etc… will be invaluable in helping ease your transition and keep the company running smoothly.

Ditch Your New Year’s Resolutions… And Create a Very Successful 2015

As we prepare to close out 2014 and begin 2015, most of us are starting to think about new year’s resolutions. 2014 is nearly gone and we get a fresh clean slate in 2015. It is a good time to step back from your business and re-assess: How did you do this year? Did you hit your profit and revenue goals? Did you execute against your strategic plan? Did you have a strategic plan? It’s so easy to get so caught up in the day to day activities of running a business only to find yourself at the end of yet another year. Those goals you laid out…still untouched. Those aspirations you had for what life would look like…still aspirations. You can vow that next year will be different, but studies show that if you don’t DO something different, build new habits into your schedule and routine, that within a few short weeks – it will be back to ‘business as usual’.

So let’s agree to make 2015 different.

Building a Sustainable Habit

To build a sustainable habit, there are several factors that need to be addressed. You must:

1. Identify your new habit. Duh… but without this critical step, you won’t build one. Let’s agree to spend just 15 minutes each day week working ON your business. That’s less than 5% of your day. Surely you can carve that out in order to build profit, revenue and value into your organization.
2. Have an emotionally compelling reason to build the habit. Building a new habit is hard. If there is no emotionally compelling reason, you won’t stick with it. My emotionally compelling reason to do a daily business review is that it will ensure I invest in and on my business. Fifteen minutes each day, 5 days each week gives me over 60 hours/year to focus on my business. That’s a week and a half each year. I think that’s a terrific investment, but if I don’t build the habit, at best I do it in spurts.
3. Find a natural time in your daily routine to add your habit that triggers you to do the habit. I add daily business focus to my daily routine right after I brush my teeth every morning. Brushing my teeth becomes a cue to do the new behavior.
4. Determine how you are going to do the new habit. What exactly will it look like, feel like? I start with a review of my overall goals for the year, then my goals for the week that feed that. Then I put some time into moving one focus area forward. It could be building an action plan, organizing a meeting, mapping out a new strategy, etc…
5. Identify a place to do the new habit. If you are starting a daily business review, where will you sit? Setting a location ensures a place for your habit, and when you are in the destination, you are more likely to trigger the habit. I carved out a space in my home office to do my daily business review. When I look at the space, I am reminded of the value of that activity.
6. Set up the tools you will need to do your new habit and set them up in the place you will do the habit. What will you need at your fingertips? For my business review, I need my business goals and priorities, and my weekly work plan. I also need my laptop, journal, pens, and stickies. As I am focused ON the business, I recognize additional activities that need to be done IN the business so I keep stickies handy to jot them down. That helps me stay focused.
7. Imagine yourself doing it right. Walk yourself through mentally how you look, feel when you are doing it well. I imagine myself sitting at my home office desk doing good quality thinking and planning and starting my day with a focus and intentionality I can be proud of.
8. Find a habit-forming partner who will do this process with you. Their new habit may be different than yours, but the accountability and support of having a buddy who is as committed to implementing their new habit as you are to implementing yours can further enhance your likelihood of making it stick.

What one new habit can revolutionize your business?

Take 15 minutes today to figure out what new habit you can build into your routine that will make 2015 a breakthrough year for you and your company, then go through these steps and design your new habit forming system.

May you have a joyful and prosperous 2015.