Reports From The Front Lines #4

3/21/2011

This week I’m headed to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Toledo and Cleveland.  I’m really excited about my Friday in Cleveland and my client, National Comfort Institute, They just finished their annual “Summit Conference” in Scottsdale, Arizona with several hundred in attendance and on this visit I’ll get many stories about the success of that endeavor. I’ll post next week with more info.

I’ve been reflecting on my most recent adventure.

Debby Peters, The Networking Guru, is a dear friend and a brilliant teacher of face to face ‘Business Networking’. She owns a company called Connextnation and you should look at her website http://www.connextnation.com/

With, my wife, Linda’s, encouragement I decided to attend the Connextnation 10 week training to help hone my networking skills. I had lunch with Debby to figure out the details including which city Findlay or Toledo would fit my schedule best.

Debby created the program but has hired training staff to teach.

At lunch Debby said, “I would never allow you to attend one of my trainings with other people you would be too disruptive”. I was crestfallen but not surprised.

So now I have the best Networking tutor in the world. We meet on most Saturday mornings for two or three hours and this Saturday we will finish chapter five with only five more to go.

I have spent the last twenty three years creating programs and teaching my clients how to use them and so I know the process.

Well, Debby smacks my paradigms and forces me to rethink my way of seeing things. It is a brutally wonderful experience and most of the time Debby forces me to ‘dig deeper’.  Wow! And we are only half way.

3/14/2011
Clients of Business Navigators are classified in a number of ways.
• Active– We are still meeting on a continuing basis either monthly or quarterly.
• Graduated – We are no longer meeting but the inactivity is caused by the realization they no longer need my visits to continue the processes we created together. They have learned to ‘Fish for themselves’ and while I miss them I’m proud to have helped them.
• Terminated– Unilaterally it has been decided to not continue the process. I’ve fired about 8 companies in the past 21 years and have been fired about 4 times.

Recently a new term has come up. I’ve decided to call it Hibernation. This classification is deactivation caused by events out of our control.

The Chicago based electrical contractor I had worked with on a monthly basis for over six years had to stop our meetings because of economic conditions. The office staff was reduced from five to two. The field workers were reduced by 50% and Business Navigators was no longer a monthly visitor. However, the owner still valued what we had done together and from time to time when I was passing through Chicago we’d have dinner and great conversations. They were hibernating.

This last Thursday they came out of hibernation and we started our first ‘Reverse-Flow’ meetings once again.

While the company had ended 2010 with a significant loss by the end of February 2011 they had added 3 more field workers and currently enjoy a Net Profit of 30%. We anticipate that profit will settle down to 12% or 15% by June and that beats an industry average of 1.5% to 2.5%.

Bears hibernate when it gets too cold to move easily. Spring is coming.

It looks like a bear market is on its way.