Monday Mindset: If you want the staff to give great service to customers, the leaders have to give great service to the staff

Posted on 22 August 2011 by

This is Zingerman’s Natural Law of Business No. 5, which originally comes from Robert Greenleaf’s book, Servant Leadership.

Here’s the concept in a nutshell: The service that the staff gives to customers is never going to be better than the service that we as leaders provide to the staff.

Interestingly, your first priority when running your business should be to treat your staff well, THEN treat your customers well as a second priority. Not the way round you’d think eh? That’s because your team invariably will be the first point of contact your clients have with your business, and if they’re not full of excitement for the vision of your business, and don’t communicate that in everything they do, your customers aren’t going to stick around for long!

With that in mind….here are 5 Golden Rules For Working With Your First Virtual Assistant

1.)    Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! This could be all five rules.  The importance of regular and consistent communication with your VA can not be stressed enough.  Have weekly meetings where you can see one another (use Skype!), talk through the priorities of the week, and clarify project plans.  Take the time to build a relationship with your VA.  It’s more pleasant working with people than just faceless names on a computer screen, and you will be more likely to get better work from employees who see you as a person rather than just a task allocator.

2.)    Provide specific guidelines and timelines: Use a project management system, to do list manager or even a simple spreadsheet to list out tasks and deadlines.  This will ensure both of you can easily see the status of your projects and avoid any confusion over assignments or deadlines.  When communicating tasks be clear in your direction and available to your VA if they have any questions – see above – a weekly meeting makes this easier.

3.)    Don’t be afraid to delegate: You’ve hired a VA so it’s time to let go a little.  A great way to think about what to delegate is to look at all areas of your business.  What items do you simply not enjoy doing?  Where would an extra hand be the most help?  Are there things you do every day that takes away from directly increasing your revenue?  These are the tasks to delegate to your VA.  Think about this; if you are now free to concentrate fully on revenue generating tasks, how much more could your business grow?

4.)    Share Your Vision: To get the most out of your VA, take time to communicate the vision of your business, this will strengthen your relationship and provide your VA with clear direction and insight into you and your business goals.  When your VA understands how their task fit into the big picture, they can become a true business partner and offer more and more value.

5.)    Evaluate: Provide regular feedback to your VA on their performance and be open to their feedback too.  Let your VA know what they do for you that is excellent and what you would like them to do better.  A mix of positive and constructive feedback will help your VA improve and lead to better results for you.  Be open to ideas and feedback from your VA too.  If you are communicating well (see #1 & 5 above) then your VA will know your business goals and can offer ideas to improve your processes, make suggestions for new projects and more.

What are your golden rules for virtual team success?  Share below so we can all learn from one another.

Monday Mindset: People Do Their Best Work When They’re Part Of A Really Great Organization

Posted on 11 July 2011 by

This is the Zingerman’s Natural Laws Of Business No 4.

Some of you I know have teams, or perhaps you have just one other person to help you out, and I know many more of you have a team of people to support you as part of your longer term vision. This week I’m asking you to stop and ponder about how your team thinks about working for you.

This is a very old and oft-told story, but I think provides a beautiful example of the vision I have here for our team at JigsawBox – with my answers your typical Virtual Assistant might give in brackets added!

“On a foggy autumn day nearly 800 years ago a traveller happened upon a large group of workers adjacent to the River Avon. Despite being tardy for an important rendezvous curiosity convinced the traveller that he should inquire about their work. With a slight detour he moved toward the first of the three tradesmen and said “my dear fellow what is it that you are doing?” The man continued his work and grumbled, “I am cutting stones.” ( I am setting up WordPress). Realising that the mason did not wish to engage in a conversation the traveller moved toward the second of the three and repeated the question. To the traveller’s delight this time the man stopped his work, ever so briefly, and stated that he was a stonecutter. He then added “I came to Salisbury from the north to work but as soon as I earn ten quid I will return home.” (I work for this person, but as soon as someone offers me more money or one of my other clients decides to run a tele-summit, you won’t see me for dust!) The traveller thanked the second mason, wished him a safe journey home and began to head to the third of the trio.

When he reached the third worker he once again asked the original question. This time the worker paused, glanced at the traveller until they made eye contact and then looked skyward drawing the traveller’s eyes upward. The third mason replied, “I am a mason and I am building a cathedral.” (I’m helping create a community of coaches to help more clients and have more free time).”

So how does your Virtual Assistant or Team feel about working to support what you do? What would their answers be? Dare you forward them this post and ask them to comment?!?

Do you give them a series of tasks to be done, or do you include them in your vision, and hold them accountable as you all work towards it together. Getting the third answer isn’t something that just happens – it takes time, focus and persistence to develop – important to realise when it’s so easy to get up while posting tweets/blog posts/writing sales pages…

When I visited Zingerman’s with my mentor Yanik Silver, he commented that he could see how creating a great feeling amongst your team would be possible when you all work in the same physical location, with weekly ‘team huddles’, motivational poster and an on-site training centre. The challenge most of us have is trying to create this sense of loyalty and buy-in to the bigger picture on a virtual basis.

It’s certainly part of our vision and we’re a global virtual team, I’d love to hear how YOU’RE doing it?

Lessons from Zingermans #1: give your customers a really compelling reason to buy from you

Posted on 06 June 2011 by

So if you’ve been following on from last week’s Monday Mindset piece of Lessons from Zingerman’s #1 Vision, the second ‘natural law’ of business Ari refers to is ‘Give your customers a really compelling reason to buy from you’. And I’ll try to share with you what we at JigsawBox are trying to do to implement these laws too!

Now that sounds like common sense right? But I know many of you have a sense of ‘entitlement’ about the fact that your clients ‘should’ buy from you.

Ari’s approach at Zingerman’s is that they need their customers far more than their customers need them. They assume they have nothing to buy that anyone really needs (if you don’t know Zingermans they run a fabulous deli, roadhouse and several other foodie businesses) – AND they know they sell pretty much what loads of other businesses are selling. So to keep their clients and bank balance happy, they have to come up with REALLY compelling reasons their customers buy from them time and time again.

They’ve worked out what they are, and they focus on improving these core differentiators all the time.

Here at JigsawBox, apart from having a tool you just can’t find anywhere else (which gives us a distinct advantage!), my mission is that you buy from us and stay with us for a number of reasons, but one of our big priorities is our customer service. We want our JigsawBoxers to feel how much we appreciate and care about their business success and we’re working towards ‘we’re here to help you ANYTIME you need it’.

For us that’s meant enabling a ‘live chat’ feature when our ‘Support Queens’ are on duty and a whole project where we’re focusing on client retention and happiness to work on ways to improve so that you truly feel it.

That’s just one example of how we’re doing this here – how about you?

Lessons from Zingermans #1: Vision

Posted on 30 May 2011 by

When I attended my recent mastermind group meeting in Ann Arbor, my mentor Yanik Silver arranged for us to spend a day at Zingerman’s. For those of you that don’t know Zingerman’s, they were recently voted the ‘coolest small company in America’ and we got to spend the whole day with one of their two founders, Ari Weinzweig – a truly inspirational man.

Get his book and read it to have some of the ‘Zingerman’s experience’ for yourself.

As part of the day, he shared with us his 12 Natural  Laws Of Business and for the next few weeks, the lessons I learned from Zingerman’s will be replacing our regular Monday Mindset slot (although they truly are mindset pieces as you’ll see).

So Law #1 is ‘An inspiring, strategically sound vision leads to greatness’.

Ari shared with us his vision for Zingerman’s 2020 and explained just how embedded and powerful the concept and practice of visioning is in his business. Their business vision is covered in every staff orientation and every single member of staff you meet there from the dishwasher to the bakers know and buy-into the bigger vision for the company.

Ari recommends an exercise to get you started where you simply sit and let flow from the end of your pen, the vision you have for your business in the time-frame that you choose ( a couple of years out if you’re pretty new). I’ve done similar exercises before, but Ari recommends you write and write whatever comes into your head (he uses swear words just to keep the pen going when he gets stuck!!) for a full 30 minutes. Then leave that draft alone for a couple of days and revisit it up to three times.

I realised it’s the stuff that comes out after you’d normally stop (maybe 10, 15 minutes into this) that really shows you what you truly want your business to end up looking like, what your staff and customers will be saying about you then.

And when you’re suffering from those business moments of doubt, it’s such a valuable piece of paper to pull out and remind you what you’re heading for and why all that hard work is worth it.

So, I’d love it if you’d set aside 30 minutes and create that first draft of your vision for the next 2 years and share your insights and aha’s as you do. Once I’ve firmed mine up, I’ll be sharing with you so watch this space…there’s a lot of good things in there for you my treasured customers and readers :)