Our story was something along these lines, and to clarify Mark (my husband) and I have a strong personal relationship, but it is not perfect and so there is some ‘stuff.’ What we failed to appreciate was just how much of our personal lives we were injecting into our business and how this was eating into our productivity, profits and potential.

A list of the tasks and management principles used by a large company, and there are a few below, should be similar for a smaller outfit, although the order of magnitude may differ.

•    The most qualified person to do a particular job, should be doing it: The poor salesman needs to get trained and good, or move over and let someone else do it.
•    What are the aims and objectives of the company?: If you want to make a million pounds while your partner wants to save the world, then factor this into your objectives and direction.

•    Short, medium and long term goals: You must understand each other’s goals and motivations so that you act synergistically.

•    Company values: If one partner is operating the business outside of the values of the other, then the business risks failure. For example, if your top company value is helping people, whilst your partner seeks financial wealth, someone’s values are at risk of serious compromise. This one is a deal breaker.

•    Individual strengths, weaknesses and development needs: In the big corporate world your performance would be appraised to identify weaknesses, training needs, set targets and ensure you work to your strengths. When was the last time you had an appraisal?

•    Individual job titles, job descriptions and responsibilities: If no-one has a job description, how do you ensure the dull and difficult stuff gets done, or eliminate overlaps, i.e. two people doing the same job

•    Have you assigned yourself an hourly rate?: By this I mean, what would you pay yourself per hour, for what you produce. If you don’t know what your time is worth, how can you decide if you should do a job yourself or pay someone else?

What will you change when you know the precise cash value of your wasted hours?

Perhaps you are like a lot of couples who decide to go into business? At first you’re so busy in the trenches that forward planning is the last thing on your mind. If you take a step back now, do you and your partner do any of these?

•     Accept substandard work rather than risk hurting your partner’s feelings.

•    Bringing last night’s argument into the office.

•    Redoing your partner’s work because it is not up to your standard.

•    Discussing at length how, why and by whom a job should be done.

•    Rehashing and re-organising systems.

•     Agreeing with a proposal you think is flawed, just to keep the peace.

•    Both of you doing the same job, which only needed doing once.

•    Rushing a job which has now become urgent because no-one was responsible for completing it on time.

If you do any of the above, do you know what it costs you?

The quantifiable resources such as wasted time spent squabbling or by inefficiencies; unnecessary travelling time and costs; additional printing or postage, phone bills, extra taxes, unused products…

And what of the even scarier unquantifiables such as lost sales; lack of momentum, unused or wasted resources, lost energy, lost the will to live.

If you could spend just one day to identify with certainty your individual strengths; align your personal and company values; set exciting and empowering business and personal goals; develop a congruent business plan AND take away with you all the skills and tools you both need to repeat the process and realign your values whenever you wanted, and as your company evolves – how much would that be worth to you? Later on I’ll tell you about the really tiny thing which Mark and I discovered but which turned not only our business, but our personal lives around. But first, a little background information about how we happened at that point. When we started our company Stormchasers Ltd we just divvied up the jobs so that all the important tasks would get done. This is what happened:

•    Instead of doing my boring jobs, I would poke my nose in to find Mark a more efficient way of doing his.

•     I might decide not to tell Mark there was a better way to do his job, for fear of undermining him.

•    Frustrated, eventually I would tell him there was a better way of doing his job, but in a way that did undermine him.

•    Mark would give in to my suggestions for ‘improvement’ just to keep the peace; but I hadn’t really thought things through properly so the job would get done my way, but now ineffectively.

•    I would come up with loads of business ideas which I would partly implement.

•    We discussed everything at length for fear of excluding each other from decisions.

•    We spent ages fussing and arguing over trifling issues and left the really important matters alone for fear of causing a serious rift in our personal relationship.

If these seem inconsistent and contradictory, that’s because they are, and that happened because each one of us was lurching between deciding to accept poor workmanship, or a bad decision by the other, to reaching the point of no compromise where something had to change.

I’m a certified Master NLP Practioner and came across Value Systems as part of my ongoing studies and decided to try it out on us. This is what we found.

Mark is operating at values level 4 where hierarchy, duty and having the correct system to follow are extremely important. Interestingly, he spent sixteen happy and productive years in the army. Values level 4 people often don’t feel their personal reward is of upmost importance; they crave purpose, order, stability and someone in charge to provide direction. Their management system is hierarchical with order maintained and a defined decision making process. They have a sense of duty and believe in doing what’s right.

I on the other hand am largely a values level 5 where individual goals and seeking out the best way are important. Values level 5 will compete to succeed, sense possibilities for change and find an individual opportunity to do better. These are the innovators and idea generators. The entrepreneurs. Goal setters and seekers. They have no sense of duty and believe in doing what’s right for them.

This was an amazing revelation for us. Before, we had a task based organization.

Mark – retail, accounts

Sian – paying bills, getting customers

However, there are some fundamental elements missing from the above structure, which prevented us from moving forward. After our values revelation, we restructured to this.

Sian – Strategic big picture, product development, testing, focus and system development.

Mark – Detailed processes, retail, accounts, bills.

Both of us – goals, vision, job descriptions, aims and corporate values

Today I contribute the ideas to move us forward – the strategic direction, whilst Mark provides the stability and delivers the systems and day-to-day jobs, which now get done on time. He says, “It’s Sian’s role to come up with the ideas, and my job to organise the chaos she creates into real productivity.”

We learned that instead of him dreading me taking over, Mark was desperately wondering where the structure and rules were. I on the other hand, was so wary of being seen as a domineering tyrant who wanted to be in charge of everything, that I did nothing and was largely unproductive.

An NLP Practitioner will structure a bespoke programme for you, but you can start right now by applying these ideas for change.

1. Create a positive environment for change and development by agreeing to be honest, trusting and accepting of a performance less than perfect. Don’t point score.

2. Each work out your life and business values and describe what they mean for you.

3. Agree common values for your business.  Examples could be integrity, customer satisfaction, delivering value, making money and helping others.

4.  Brainstorm all the jobs that must be done for your business to run smoothly.   Beside each, write the name of the person who will deliver. Agree empowerment.  No poking noses in.

5.  Establish areas where either or both of you lacks confidence such as cold calling or dealing with customer complaints.

6.  Use the information in items 4 and 5 to establish a training, development and appraisal programme.

7. Each write a job description and decide job titles.

8. Set business and personal goals.

Do it all again 6 months later.

–

Sian Murphy is a direct response copywriter who works with Alan Forrest Smith as part of the Orange Beetle Team. In addition to writing for sianmurphycopywriter.com and the non-conformist Orangebeetle.com/blog she also writes and publishes articles on business and personal development.

It is not wrong to celebrate success, but if you are still partying a week after you land the big order, what has happened meanwhile?

If you respond to a fantastic result with hysterical glee, will you plunge into the depths of despair when you lose a sale?

To win in the long term your emotional keel must be steady and without the yawing highs and lows. You may find the key to this skill rather surprising.

Do you know someone who sulks? Some people can sulk for years. At first this may not seem particularly valuable, however, consider this – the prolonged sulker has developed a strategy of sustaining one emotional state for a very long time.

What if they could do this with a different emotion? Well they can if they mimic how they manage to sulk for so long and transfer the skill to something more productive, such as confidence or motivation.

The secret strategies behind every behaviour are a party compendium pack of the following components

*visual by creating and seeing pictures in your imagination
*auditory
*feelings
*listening to self talk
*smells and tastes

To elicit your strategy for a particular behaviour, such as buying, sleeping, or insomnia, just run through your process and plot through each step.

Imagine Steve who has an excellent sulking strategy which goes like this�

Three years ago Steve�s brother Bob went to a works party instead of Steve�s birthday bash. Each morning since then Steve…

*has made a picture in his head of Bob enjoying himself at the works party

*says to himself �How could Bob do that to me, he obviously prefers his work mates to his own brother.�

*then gets a nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach and his throat gets tight as all the familiar feelings flood back

Steve runs this strategy every morning and can keep the sulk going all day, regardless of anything else which could brighten his mood.

But Steve could also use this strategy to conjure up a winning state of mind as a salesman by:

*making a picture of himself sat in his office as a signed contract for a 100 fleet cars slides across the desk towards him

*saying to himself – �WOW I NAILED it, I�m brilliant at sales. What a FANTASTIC deal!”

*feeling the exciting rush of adrenalin as all the familiar feelings flood back

If he ran this strategy every morning, Steve could spend his days electrified with anticipation as he chalks up the triumphs.

What would it mean to you to spend every day like Steve?

————————

Sian Murphy is a copywriter with the internationally acclaimed copywriter and marketer Alan Forrest Smith and his Orangebeetle team. She also runs sianmurphycopywriter.com and loves to know what you think about the articles.  To comment, suggest new topics and discover Top Ten Copywriting Style Pitfalls You Can Avoid then visit

http://www.sianmurphycopywriter.com/10-style-pitfalls-to-avoid-in-your-sales-copy