Category: Uncategorized

Do you have a failure Policy?

Do you have a failure Policy?

Posted on by Doogie Levine

Do you have a failure Policy?

 

In today’s fast-paced business world, mistakes and failures will inevitably occur. While companies must strive for success, it is also crucial to have a policy that addresses mistakes and treats them as a natural part of the learning and innovation process.

What is a Failure Policy?

 

A failure policy is your company’s beliefs, philosophy, and process for how to handle when a person makes a mistake. 

 

Why should your company take the time to write a Failure Policy?

 

Having a clear policy on failure helps create a culture of learning and innovation within a company. It allows employees to feel comfortable taking risks and trying new things, knowing they will not be punished for failures as long as they learn from them and take steps to prevent similar mistakes. This can foster a sense of creativity and entrepreneurship within the organization, leading to more innovative thinking and a greater willingness to take on new challenges.

 

A policy on failure can also help to reduce the fear of failure that can often hold people back. When employees know that they will not be reprimanded or punished for making mistakes, they are more likely to speak up and share their ideas, even if they are not fully formed or may not work out. This can lead to more open communication and collaboration within the organization and a greater willingness to challenge the status quo.

 

Finally, having a policy on failure can help to build trust and create a positive working environment. When employees feel that they can be open and honest about their mistakes, they are more likely to feel valued and supported by their colleagues and leadership. This can lead to increased morale and a more positive company culture overall.

 

Overall, companies need to have a policy that addresses failure and treats it as a natural part of the learning and innovation process. By fostering a culture of learning and innovation and creating an open and supportive environment, companies can encourage risk-taking and creativity, leading to greater success in the long run.

 

Is your company ready to create its failure policy? 

 

If YES, let’s chat and see if IAS can help your business on the path to openness, trust, and increased profits.

 

IAS is your Chief Operations Officer in a box. We will work with you to make sure you have all the right policies, high-functioning procedures, and rockstar personnel to get the result you deserve. If you’re a business owner or member of the C-suite struggling to get the results your looking for and have already worked with other experts. Then let’s connect and see how one of IAS Fractional COOs can help ensure your business is set up for long-term success.

Customer Service Secrets

Customer Service Secrets

Posted on by Doogie Levine
Attract client to post about customer service

Shhh... I Have a Secret

You can create a great customer service system for your business in 3 easy steps.

Customer service is a pretty hot topic and can make or break your business. Consumers have little patience for lousy customer service and quickly get tired of waiting in long lines, trying to get a live person on the line, going through an interrogation to return something, or trying to communicate through a language barrier. 

If you provide them with a simple, efficient, pleasant experience, they will revisit your business over and over. More importantly, your clients will tell everyone they know! 

There are three secrets to good customer service; the first one we’re going to conquer is knowing exactly what YOU want.

You are the captain of the ship and the visionary for your business’s future, so you need to have a clearly defined plan for your business, including customer service. There are three main goals you need to consider:

  • Understand Your Road Blocks
    • It needs to be easy for your customers to do business with you. You can do this with advertised discounts, kiosks, your website, and other technology-based programs to help them shop. No matter what medium you chose, make sure you understand all of the steps your asking your client to do. Then make sure you can make them as easy as possible.

 

  • Your Experience Needs to be Like Talking with Mom
    • Doing business with you needs to be a warm and pleasant experience. Your staff has to be knowledgeable, approachable, warm, and patient. Your customers need to feel like they are getting good value for their time and money. Perceived value goes beyond the price of the products and extends to their shopping experience.

 

  • A Penny Wise a Dollar Foolish
    • Change your mindset and ask yourself, “How can I NOT afford to do these things?” This shouldn’t be a question of expenses, but making and keep happy customers. It is always essential to think about customer lifetime value when dealing with complaints, refunds, replacements, etc. Think a penny today is a dollar tomorrow.

With these thoughts in mind, you also need to consider a few things when deciding on the actual programs and standards you’ll put into place.

  • Share your customer service vision with the rest of your staff. 
  • Empower your staff to make decisions at the moment.
  • Connect your incentive programs and bonuses directly to customer service.
  • Monitor the level of customer service your staff is putting out.
  • Set a time to review and improve your customer experience regularly.
  • Know when you can ignore what your customers want.
  • Continuously focus on your goals.

 

Now that you know what you want, you can start thinking about meeting those wants and creating a positive customer service experience.

If you’re having a hard time deciding on what you want, the tools, resources, and coaches in our GUIDED TOUR can help you define your company’s wants and needs in relation to customer service.

5 Quick Tips for a Kick A$$ Internship

5 Quick Tips for a Kick A$$ Internship

Posted on by Doogie Levine

Internships are no longer a tool for massive companies to get grunt work out of college kids. It is a significantly underutilized option for small businesses to develop high-quality talent. Entrepreneurs tend to be overworked and stretched thin. Many of them have dreams of growing their business by adding digital marketing, business outreach, sales teams, or taking a real vacation. However, most feel they lack the funds to invest in their business. 

Here comes the power of an internship. The internship provides you the opportunity to get high-quality inexperienced talent at a low to no cost. It also is a fantastic tool for building relationships with major educational institutions.

Take a minute and review the graph to understand the cost and benefits of adding this program. It is always essential to understand what your committing to before you get started.

Cost/ Benefits

I have created several internship programs, from short 4-week middle school programs to multi-year professional programs. Here are my tips for creating an effective program for both you and the participant.

Set aside time.

It is pivotal before you get started creating a program, you first organize your schedule. Most internships require a reasonable amount of time upfront to get up and running. Then minimal time to maintain the progress.

Here is a rough time breakdown to run an effective small business internship program.

  • 3-5 hours for initial planning
  • 4 hours for onboarding 
  • 1 hour a day for the first two weeks 
    • Specifically for skills training and internship planning
  • 15 min a day for daily check-in
  • 1 hr every two weeks for the remainder of the internship 
    • Continued skills development
    • Performance review

Start with the talent.

Now that you have a rough idea of the time commitment, my next tip is to start by finding great talent. Most people will tell you to start by having a problem in mind and then find the person to solve it. 

However, when it comes to internships, most of the people you talk to will not have extensive experience or knowledge. It is best to look for two things talent and attitude. The rest you can teach them or even better they will learn themselves. Hire fast and let them have some control of the scope of their work.

Define the scope.

When starting a program, make sure you keep the project somewhat vague. Once you have great talent, engage them in identifying the work that will benefit the organization. How do you do this?

Tell them your desired outcome, for instance, if you would like them to take on your marketing. Then simply say that you would like to see a 10% increase in inbound leads. Then they can figure out how to achieve this goal, and you can coach them to this desired goal. 

Find the right partner.

Go to your local high school, junior college, college, technical school, or university and offer an internship for the semester by connecting with the student affairs office and at least one professor in a field similar to your business. Set up a meeting and discuss the possibilities.

For example, every business needs additional administrative help, so offer an internship to a student majoring in business administration. The schools LOVE it when a company provides internships since they act as a value-add to their educational offerings by providing their students with real-world experience. Make sure you negotiate that the school will give the student credit. On the flip side, if you find the right student, they can do all of this for you.

Prepare to mentor, be patient. 

Have a plan to mentor and develop the missing skills of your interns. Once you have created the space for them to successfully make sure you provide them access to the coaching/skill development to achieve your desired outcome. 

I strongly suggest taking a scientific approach to coaching. What I mean is be prepared for your interns to fail. Use their failure as a chance to improve your process. Remember, an internship is a low risk and high potential reward. The only way to get those results is to create a process around failure. 

Measure Your Results.

The final tip is to make sure you measure your results. I strongly suggest committing to running your internship at least three times before you scrap it. Each time you run, make sure you measure it against the previous results and against what your business was like before having the program. Make adjustments and improvements with each iteration.

Here are few categories to consider when evaluating your program:

  • Revenue/profit
  • Where you spend your time
  • Problem solved vs. created
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Intern satisfaction 
  • Your happiness

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section and feel free to share your top internship tips. For additional business improvement strategies, get your free copy of my book here. 

I am actively seeking business case studies for my next book; if you would like to be featured, please email me at doogie@ideasactionsuccess.com to set up a time chat. 

Eisenhower didn’t just win WW2; he also won the to-do list!

Posted on by Doogie Levine

I continue to meet business owner after business owner, professional after professional, with the same common thread. They felt distracted continuously and stressed. Their caught in the rate race of putting out fires and never feel like they have the time to focus on their goals.

I bet you have said this before. 

“Let me send one more email, and I will do (INSERT UNPLEASANT TASK HERE) later. Three hours later, it is too late. I’ll deal with it tomorrow”; sounds familiar.

If this has happened to you, keep reading. 

Why do you thinking you struggle?

  • Is it a lack of clear goals? 
  • No sense of direction. 
  • Overwhelmed by the share size of your to-do list.

Yes, it might be those things, but it is more than likely your lack of ability to understand and set priorities. The four main areas that most likely make up your to-do list are Tactics, Strategies, Mission, and Distractions.

  • Tactics the short to medium goals & task that allow executing strategies
  • Strategies the long term goals & systems that allow achieving a Mission.
  • Distractions are all the items you should say no to or avoid.
  • Mission the ideal state that you get from achieving all of your tactics and strategies and avoiding distractions.

Today, I want to give you one tool to prioritize your tactics and strategies and avoid distractions to achieve your mission. Let me introduce you to the Eisenhower Matrix.

Eisenhower Matrix 

The Eisenhower Matrix was a tool created by non-other then Dwight Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States of America. He made this method while serving as the supreme allied commander. Every day he was tasked with figuring out how to prioritize the efforts of the Allies.

As you can imagine, it was a gargantuan challenge. The tool President Eisenhower created allowed him to measure all his tasks by their urgency and importance. Take a look at the example below and ask yourself the following questions:

  • What quadrant do I spend most of my time in?
  • How much of my time is spent in that quadrant?

Suppose you’re like most people, you said quadrant 1, followed by 3. You said something like 60 to 80% of your time is spent in those quadrants. Does that not feel like a lot? This is how most of us spend our time between a hyper state of stress and a hyper state of distraction. 

Ideally, you want to spend the majority of your day in quadrant 2. In this quadrant, most of your day will be spent working on projects and tasks that will have long-term benefits to yourself, your job, or your business. You will feel a great sense of accomplishment without the stress of rushing to meet a deadline. It is in this state that we achieve growth. I want to propose a challenge to help you gain control of your workday.

Here it is a 7-day challenge to deploy the Eisenhower Matrix in your life. You will create a time journal.

Time Journal

Time
Activity
Quadrant 
9AM-11AM
Team Meeting
3
11AM-1PM
Daily Lead Reports
1
1PM-2Pm
Strategy Meeting
2
3PM-5PM
Emails, Instagram, Tick Tok
4

Total Hours:_______

Total Hours per quadrant  1_____ 2_____3_____4_____

Using this tool, I want you to track the amount of time you spend in each quadrant per day over seven days. To be honest, if you do this for just one day, you will be blown away by how you spend your time or maybe not. At least it will force you to hold yourself accountable for your actions.

At the end of the seven days, go back, review the amount of time and the list of activities you did in each area. From here, you can choose how to reduce the time spent in quadrants 1,3 & 4. Increase your time in quadrant 2.

Quick tips for improving your time use to spend more time in quadrant 2.

For quadrant 1:

  • Communicate with your team or support group about what is on your plate. They may be able to help.
  • Delegate 
  • Schedule management tasks (these aren’t really fires but feel like they are) like
    • Checking Email.
    • Fulfilling Orders.
    • Data Entry.
    • Lead Calls (Do it before 10 am).

For Quadrant 3:

  • Delegate 
  • Watch the time investment.
  • Do them last.
  • Add to a long term list.
  • Tell your colleague sorry I just don’t have time.
  • Put on do not disturb. 

For Quadrant 4:

  • Say “NO”
  • Suppose media/social media is essential to you; set times to check it throughout the day. Limit the length of those checks.
  • When a colleague comes over to chat, it is okay to say, “I can’t chat right now.”

Let me know the results. Click here for more Free Expert Advice. Thank you for reading my blog; it means a lot to me that you took the time. Please share this blog with your colleagues and friends who can benefit from better business practices.

Turn Prospects into Customers Overnight and End Buyers Remorse!

Posted on by Doogie Levine
Today I’d like to talk about turning prospects into customers and retaining them for future marketing. While your marketing is doing its job, you need to turn those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be:
  • Inviting
  • Informative
  • Enjoyable
The biggest fear of most new customers is the dread of buyer’s remorse. You want to avoid this at all costs, and this should be mitigated if you’ve provided a quality product/service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made. However, this can still occur. There are two ways to deal with this:
  • Offer to refund money-no questions asked.
  • Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product.
These offers alone will also mitigate buyer’s remorse because the customer will trust you more just for offering these things. There are several other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:
  1. Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market.
  2. Offer a lower price with the reason for pushing inventory to pay a tax bill for your kid’s’ braces or another tangible reason. Customers love that this makes you feel so much more human.
  3. Offer a referral incentive.
  4. Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust.
  5. Offer package deals.
  6. Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
  7. Offer extra incentives-longer warranties, free bonuses if ordered by a set date.
  8. Offer financing options, if applicable.
  9. Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
  10. Offer special packaging or delivery.
  11. Offer “name your own price” incentives.
  12. Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
  13. Offer a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have.
  14. Offer additional educational information to help them make the decision.
The options are as limitless as you make it. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products/service, and target market. Remember this… “By making it is inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring, and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.” Jay Abraham Need help with figuring out the best strategy for converting prospects into customers? Download this Free E-book to get being implementing these changes today.