business coach

You’ll Never Change!

by
Change ahead arrow
Never say never! Maybe you’ve tried starting a business or changing careers before, and it hasn’t worked out. Or maybe you’ve considered it, but talked yourself out of it because of your responsibilities, the risks, the time involved…who knows? One thing is for sure, unless you approach it with a plan of action, just like any other business endeavour, you’re doomed. The first part of the plan is to figure out what kind of chance you want to make. Here are five tips to get you started on the right path again:
  1. Envision the future. Give yourself a long runway, maybe five years. Where would you like to be? What will you be doing? Who’s with you? What’s your message? Who’s listening? Painting a clear, detailed picture will let you get a handle on what you want and need from the change. This will help you focus on what you’ll get, and that’s important to keep yourself going when the hard parts of the change begin (because they will).
  2. How did you get there? Look backward from the success you’ve achieved. What skills or talents did you use to get there? These are the tools in your toolkit that you want to use. It’s important to know whether you’ve got everything you need – or whether you’ll need to build regular learning into the picture. (Hint: if you’re not learning and stretching, you’re not thinking big enough – and it won’t feel like you’ve changed anything when you arrive).
  3. Why did you want to go in the first place? Author Simon Sinek recommends that you start with “why”, and then work on what and how – but sometimes it’s difficult to get your brain around the motivation before you figure out what it is that you are motivated to do. If you’d rather start with the purpose, because you already know you want to educate kids or save kittens, go for it. Start here, then backtrack to Step One.
  4. If you tried before, what didn’t work? Don’t do that. Seriously, evaluate what it was about your first effort that failed. You’ve probably done plenty of thinking about that already. Now figure out the actions and attitudes that did work – and work on those. You’ll get a much clearer picture of actions that were helpful and harmful than you had, the last time.
  5. If you’ve never tried, start now. Honestly, start anywhere. Work on your business model. Interview some people in your ideal role. Profile a customer. It doesn’t matter. As soon as you break them logjam and start moving toward the change you’ve been looking for, you’ll start to pick up momentum. Make time to commit to a few steps every day, and just keep going. Eventually, it will all come together. Just dreaming about it won’t get you anywhere.

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Founding Partners here at PANOPTIKA. Are you experiencing a specific challenge with your new business, or your dream business? Let’s talk. We help our clients find, know, and keep customers – so they can build strong businesses that stand the test of time. You can find more advice from us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Subscribe using the button below for special news and offers from us. 

Send me news I can use!

Are you looking in the wrong place for success?

by



You made it! You’re on top of the world. But this isn’t where the learning happens.

Think about the most important lessons you’ve learned. Did they happen when at the moment you achieved your goal? More likely, they happened afterward, as you reflected on your struggle. You may have even had a richer learning experience when you didn’t achieve your goal. Think about all those “I’ll never make that mistake again” moments you’ve had. Win or learn, mistakes, failures, and struggles mean you will enter into the next challenge stronger and more able to deal with the difficulties you may face.

What does this tell me? That each roadblock or difficulty prepares you to be even better next time. That the reward for the journey is the journey itself. And that you’ll gain experience and confidence, no matter which path you take, or no matter how everything turns out. Now that’s something to be on top of the world about.

Send me news I can use!

Don’t Spend Money on Learning

by
Hands with money and plant

Invest it!

Too often, business owners and entrepreneurs forego educational opportunities and occasions to learn because they cost money. Oh, they’ll spend money on advertising, or sales collateral, or even a new point-of-sale system. But when it comes to researching customers to serve them better, or worse yet, adding new skills  to their own personal toolkit, they try to only use the “free” option. This is wrong-headed thinking, in our opinion. Why do we think that?

We believe spending money to learn is an investment. Investing in customer research can help you target more effectively, or move into more productive markets. Investing in tools or skills that make you more productive and a better seller will pay dividends to your business in short order. Thinking of either of these things as “spending” is a little like saving for retirement by putting your money in a sock under your mattress.

Of course you can’t invest your money everywhere – so just like that retirement fund, you’ll need to do some research to find what works best for you. And also like your other investments, you may have trouble figuring out just what that is. If that’s the case, find yourself a coach who can help you evaluate your options.

There’s a new skill or new information out there that will help your business grow. Start looking for your next investment, today.

I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Founders and Partners at PANOPTIKA. If you’re having trouble prioritizing your career or business investments, I can help. With frameworks to help allocate their resources, we help our clients make better decisions. Feeling social? Follow on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or on Facebook. And if you want business and career tips, book recommendations, and more, push the button below to subscribe to our weekly news.

 
Send me news I can use!

Oooh, Our Spider Sense is Tingling

by
Picture

 

 
What does a spider have to do with understanding your customers? No, it’s not a metaphor for entangling them in a sticky web and holding them captive while you make a meal of them. But there is a metaphor involved. Let me explain! 

 

We like to use metaphor-based serious games like Innovation Games® to help teams become more customer-centric. It’s a fun way to reinforce this important perspective, when your team may have had a nice relaxing summer, and now, in a panic to get sales back on track, they’re focusing too much on features, and not enough on the people the features are for. Or, they may be thinking too much about the competition, and not enough about those same customers. We’re experts at the Innovation Game Spider Web, and we love using it as a tool to get teams back in touch with the thing that should be at the centre of their world. (Hint: it’s not your product). With the customer at the centre of the web, we guide your team in an in-depth exploration of 

  1. The problems customers encounter that could be solved by your product or service
  2. Why those problems are important (and what job they’re trying to do when they encounter them)
  3. How the problems are connected, and
  4. What emotional or personal values are impacted by solving/not solving the problem

If you’d like to connect with us about a custom workshop for your team, we’d love to hear from you. To hear more about the ways we’re helping our customers to see everything and make better decisions, why not sign up for our newsletter? 

Megann and Steve Willson are the Partners and Founders of PANOPTIKA, and the Authors of this blog. If you’d like to learn more about what they’ve got to share, you can follow on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or on Facebook. You can also become part of our inner circle and receive free content direct to your inbox. 

 
Send me news I can use!

If The Teacher Will Appear When You’re Ready, How will You Know It’s Time?

by
Picture
 
You’ve got a great team of mentors who have helped you get this far, there’s no way they could be holding you back, is there?

​If you have ever taken lessons in a sport, or music, or some other area of your life where you did really well and it seemed to come naturally, you may have also experienced a time when you had to move on to a different teacher, at a higher level. You can have a certain need for support and interaction, and someone can be exactly the right teacher or confidante for that time and place. But as you grow, your needs may change. The good teacher will recognize this, and encourage you to move on. Someone who wants you to stay at the same level, may have their own challenges to work on – and you will need to work on gaining the wisdom to know the difference. This is your job to manage.

As you become faster, fitter, stronger, or whatever goal you have set for yourself, you also need to be looking for those around you who will help you keep up the challenge. At the gym, when the set of weights become easy to lift, experts at fitness know that it’s time to try something heavier or harder. The same is true with your career. Otherwise you are possibly just playing it safe, and coasting. You don’t have to be constantly dissatisfied with your progress, that’s not the point. It’s that by pushing to the next stage, you will begin to build your confidence in just how far you have come – and how far you can go in the future. People who have lost significant amounts of weight say things like, “I can’t believe how much I used to eat”, or “Wow, I would never drink so much on the weekends now, it seems so unhealthy”. Each new challenge is an opportunity for you to build your confidence, and knowing when or whether you need a new teacher is also part of your growth.

If you feel like you’re not progressing, it may be time to look for the next teacher to appear. If you believe you’re ready, you are.

We’re Megann and Steve Willson, the Partners behind PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to build better businesses and have better relationships with customers and peers, by helping them see everything they need to know to make better decisions. If you’ve got big decisions to make, we’d like to hear from you. You can also get more free advice on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or by clicking the orange button, below. 

 
Send me news I can use!

The Platinum Pivot

by
When you think of startup founders, what do you think of? Do they look something like this? 
Picture

 

 
There seems to be a perception lately that “startups” are only:

 

1. Tech companies
2. Mostly young men
3. Looking to scale exponentially and strike it rich.

In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth, and if you’re over 50, an immigrant, or a woman, the next business to launch in Canada might be yours. In 2016, over 6.6 million Canadians over age 50 were in the labour force – about a third, and the number of self-employed persons of all ages was about 2.7 million. If a third of those are self-employed, that’s 900,000 over-fifty entrepreneurs. A 2012 CIBC study noted that over-50s were the fastest-growing segment of the start-up market. While women don’t make up the lion’s share of business starts, their share is consistently growing. Immigrants, too, are finding that if they are struggling to find employment for others, building a business lets them create a job for themselves, and for others. So why not you?

As for the money, there’s nothing to say you won’t strike it rich. There are some late bloomers who went on to have very successful enterprises. Entrepreneurs also identify many other reasons, such as values alignment, more purposeful work, providing necessary but “missing” services in their communities, and employing others in their communities.

There are tremendous advantages to being an entrepreneur when you’ve already logged some career and life experience. Among these, you may have assets you can leverage for start-up capital, so you don’t have to hand over part of your business to venture capitalists, but can retain control for yourself. You’ve also had lots of time to observe a wide variety of business models that work (and don’t), and you’ve built valuable skills that can form the basis of your new enterprise.

Given the high number of workers over age 50, and yet an increasing youth bias in the workplace, there are plenty of mature workers who are (in the words of one columnist we read recently) “disappearing” themselves – doing everything they can to disguise or hide their age. Wouldn’t you think that at age 50 you had finally earned the right to be yourself? So if you’ve reached the half-century mark, we’d like to encourage you to consider the “platinum pivot© ” – think now about how you’re going to take ownership of your career and rely on your own talents for your next 20, 30 or more years of your work life. Sure, there are plenty of youthful startups out there, but they’ll all get older eventually, if they survive. You’ve just got a head start.

We’re Megann and Steve Willson, and we’re the Founders and Partners at PANOPTIKA. We started our business in our 40s, and we’re still going strong, nearly 20 years later. Let us help you build a business that’s just right for you. You can find us on Twitter, on Facebook, and on LinkedIn, and we’d be glad to have you join our inner circle and subscribe for weekly insights using the orange button, below. Let’s get growing, together. 

 
Send me news I can use!

The Wisdom of The (Right) Crowd…

by
Picture

 

 
Crowdsourcing is a fantastic way to get ideas, feedback, information, and synergistic thinking. As long as you’re hanging with the right crowd. 

Thinking carefully about who needs to be in the room for your sprint, who should be invited to respond to your survey, or whose opinion will really make a difference when you are interviewing experts for a report, has never been more important.

If you need help deciding who to ask, poll, invite, or share your concept with, just ask. We do that.

Send me news I can use!

3 ways targeting will help you build a better product

by
Target with arrows
Last week was jam-packed with events! We had a great time at one of them, watching startups, students, facilitators and generally-interested folks collaborate to come up with new ideas to help a young business grow and flourish. Everything was going swimmingly, until we heard this: 

“The first iteration of our product has had a great response and excellent feedback. With release 2 we hope to find out who our target market is.”

SCREEEEEEEEECH! What’s wrong with this picture? We love to work with growing companies, helping them develop and build their business model and validate their canvas. Getting them to ship their MVP (minimum viable product) instead of adding every possible feature all at once is exciting! Can you imagine our disappointment when we hear words that mean, “We came up with a solution to a problem, or helped a customer do a job that needs doing…but we don’t know who that customer is”?

If you’ve got a product or a prototype, and you haven’t yet validated that there are customers, and who those customers are, you’re investing an awful lot of effort in something that may never fly. Wouldn’t you rather have a product that really does “sell itself”, because it:

  1. Is just what your customer needs?
  2. Has a customer who is already looking for a solution, and is willing to pay?
  3. Adds value in some way that other solutions don’t?

If you’re worried that your latest product or service has gotten off on the wrong foot, and is flying around in search of a customer, we can help you figure out who the customer is, or isn’t, and validate that they want what you’re selling. Moreover, let’s put together your Value Proposition Canvas together, and get your business growing!

We’re Megann and Steve Willson, and we’re the Partners and Founders here at PANOPTIKA. If you need help to find, understand, or keep customers, and you’re a B2B (business-to-business) company, you’re in OUR target market. We’ll help you grow your business and make more money. You can find us on Twitter, on Facebook, or on LinkedIn. With a click of the orange button below this post, you can also subscribe for insights, offers, and ideas to help you see everything you need to know, to make better decisions.

 
Send me news I can use!

Businesses with Benefits

by
Picture
 
There’s something we’ve observed as we work with business owners – whether they’re startups or seasoned entrepreneurs, growing and scaling. Especially if the product is technical, or if it is solving something that hasn’t really been solved before, the story of what it is, can quickly get derailed. 

Entrepreneurship programs have done a great job of explaining and exploring the minimum viable product. But when it comes to talking about that product (or service, for that matter), there’s a real tendency to default to describing the features. It’s easier to answer “What does it do?” with “Here’s how it works”, or “Let me describe the features that are different from X”, than to talk about the benefits. 

Just yesterday we had a chance to sit in with a great startup group in K-W, called Startup Tech Unleashed.  There was a seasoned entrepreneur, talking about his business, and giving some really helpful, useful guidance to his peers. But we couldn’t help but notice that he started his story with the features. When he got to the benefits, POW! The story came alive. We could really understand why users were interested in the product, and why the founders created it.  There was another entrepreneur, who described himself as “not even a startup yet”, who described what his product would do, but went into lots of detail about the code, how it would work, essentially, “what would go on inside”. Again, benefits were missing from the story, and the story was weaker for it. 

We love to coach businesses to do a better job of understanding their customers, their products, their services, and their story. If your team is struggling with the difference between features and benefits, we can help. Get in touch, and let’s build a customized workshop that fits your question, and your budget. 

By the way, the startup that did get to the benefit story was Coosha – a cool calendar solution – why don’t you check them out and see if they can keep YOU from double buying the refrigerator staples that your partner already picked up this afternoon. (That sounds like a benefit to us!)

We’re Megann and Steve Willson, the Partners and Founders of PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients so they can see everything they need to know to find new customers, and gain a richer understanding of the ones they already have. You can find more insights from us on Twitter, on Facebook, or LinkedIn. We also send weekly news you can use to our subscribers. Join our inner circle  by clicking the button below. 

 
Send me news I can use!

What happens when your change methods seem like madness?

by
Change is hard, especially in organizations, and many people don’t want it, or at least they don’t want the discomfort that often seems to accompany it. If you’re brought in to be an agent for change, there are typically two paths that will get you there – evolution (which feels cumbersome and slow) or revolution (which is frequently accompanied by destruction, creative or otherwise, pain, and even some suffering).

If you are in a hurry to make things happen, one cause of pain is  having the right intention, but taking action in a way that makes that action seem more sinister than necessary. How do you remove a Band-Aid? Ripping it off can be hurtful and unsettling, but taking time to prepare the team (“this might sting a little, but it’s going to heal better once we put a fresh dressing on there”) lets them in on your thinking a little, and allows them to focus on the outcome, not just the action. On the other hand, telling them everything will be painless and then making the change with a “rrrrrip!” creates distrust, confusion, and fear. Fear and confusion breed questions like:
  • Don’t they care about our feelings?
  • I didn’t see that coming! Were they being truthful when they said I didn’t have to worry?
  • If change can just happen no matter what the circumstances…what if I’m next?

As a changemaker, your instincts may tell you to get things done quickly so your initiatives don’t stall; that’s valid. Taking a little extra time to set the stage and “p-reinforce” the benefits, though, will help you fix the situation without leaving any scars.

Send me news I can use!