Everyone seems to want to improve their efficiency, and why wouldn’t they? Efficiency is a sure way to improve time management and increase profits, right? Maybe. This is a topic that has come up several times in the past few months and in reflecting on it, I realize it has been a consistent theme in my operations and general manager positions over the years.

While efficiency is important, one needs to understand that efficiency on it’s own may not get you where you want to be. It is only one part of a vector measurement necessary to improve overall operations and profits. A vector measurement is one that includes magnitude and direction. Speed is a measurement of magnitude; velocity includes the directionality to ensure you are progressing towards the right target.

If you’re racing really fast in the wrong direction, you lose. You can be the most efficient company in the world but without any customers, you’ll soon be out of business. Driving a car downhill is the most efficient way to drive but it’s utterly useless when you are at the destination is at the top of the mountain. This doesn’t mean you should disregard efficiency, only that you need to optimize your processes for effectiveness.

Do things that take longer when it makes someone else’s job easier or improves your relationship with them. This advice was recently brought up in a recent Career Tools podcast. (Depending on your level, I highly recommend Career Tools, Manager Tools, and Executive Tools.) It may not be efficient to have weekly one-on-one meetings with your directs but the long term benefits vastly outweigh the short-term loss of productivity or efficiency.

To be effective you need to have a firm grasp of the goals and be willing to modify your processes to ensure you are progressing in the right direction at all times. I work independently and with a few amazing partners to help maximize effectiveness for my clients to improve operations, sales, and process flow. Contact me to schedule a free 30-minute meeting to discuss your situation and how I can help make you and your company more effective.

Fatigue, we all get it. What’s amazing to me is that I feel like we are just starting to talk about it. The concept of Zoom fatigue originated during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequently made us aware of all of the other sources of fatigue we experience. I’ll skip to the bottom line; make sure you are taking time to take care of you. I don’t just mean the occasional vacation where you end up working several hours a day; I mean take care of yourself daily.

A few weeks ago, I read an article titled “Change fatigue: When our brain’s adaptive capacity is depleted”. It got me thinking about some of the other causes of fatigue (and its less talked about sibling – depression). The article provides some insights into how to accept and overcome change fatigue. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “change is the only constant in life” – so we had better get used to dealing with it.

Is all change detrimental? No. It’s ironic but the lack of change can also bring about it’s own fatigue – people occasionally refer to the drudgery of being doing the same thing day after day (especially if it’s something that is no longer enjoyable). Even worse examples are the slips in mental cognition that happen during long periods of isolation or lack of stimulation.

Change can be overwhelming when there is no warning – the meeting you got pulled into at the last minute with no time to prepare. Change can also boost productivity by re-stimulating workers (check out the Hawthorne effect), however, if too many things change too quickly you’re right back to being over stimulated which will lead right back to fatigue.

Change management is similar to any other management process and can be broken down into the following steps:

1. Prepare and initiate by telling the stakeholders what is involved and why
2. Plan for the change – set goals and identify the indicators for success. Create what if scenarios using “red teams”
3. Execute (or Implement in kinder terms) the plan
4. Monitor the changes throughout the organization. Is there a ripple effect in other areas?
5. Close or Continue. If it worked, congratulations! Did something unexpected happen? Did someone see potential for further improvements?

W. Edwards Deming and Walter Shewhart modified this process into an easy to remember cycle of: Plan, Do, Check, Act which was further modified to Plan, Do, Study, Act. This simple four step process set the stage for several project management and continual improvement methodologies.

All this change can be overwhelming, make sure you are taking time to take care of you. I don’t just mean the occasional vacation where you end up working several hours a day; I mean take care of yourself daily. I’m here to help with change management solutions, a network of people who specialize in process flow, and of course my fractional and interim management solutions.

Occasionally a company I reach out to says they are “over-consulted” or they have worked with consultants in the past and it hasn’t helped. What does this say about the state of the company and the nature of the consultant relationship?

Every consultant has their own specialty: finance, sales, process improvements, operational organization, manufacturing, etc. What you are essentially getting from a consultant is access to that area of expertise. The same holds true if you were to take business classes. Would you stop at the accounting class, or would you also take classes in finance, management, and operations? By putting together a strong team of consultants and leveraging their specialties, you gain a much wider knowledge base and understanding of the interconnectedness of the different departments and systems within your organization. This is one of the areas in which I specialize, seeing how things fit together and integrating them into a single system. I also have a fantastic network of people who are experts in their fields and we work really well together – the whole really can be greater than the sum of its parts.

Some other concerns about working with consultants:

Cost: Consultants can be expensive; if your company is working with several it’s important to make sure they are well integrated and working in harmony with each other. The cost of consultants is offset in two ways: 1) the amount of time it would take your management team to learn and create the expertise your consulting team already has, and 2) the return on investment once the recommendations are implemented.

Indecisiveness: There’s a concern that if a business manager relies too heavily on consultants, they may become used to having the consultants tell them what to do and this will impair their ability to be decisive and act independently. As part of the coaching process, I teach change management, prioritization, and decision making. It’s not about doing the work for you; it’s about teaching you about the tools and how to use them. Just like in school, going to the classes isn’t enough; there is work to be done as well…

Creativity and innovation: I’ve read that some feel consulting can stifle the creativity process. Consultants offer recommendations and fresh perspectives because the management team has reached a point where they are so focused on the day to day running of the business that they don’t have time to step back and view to whole operation. Consultants can be great at brainstorming new ideas – through a process called “red teaming” I offer possible challenges and obstacles and encourage the management team to devise creative solutions.

While Jack Tar Consulting is a bit different in that we offer our “Fractional Management” solutions, I still provide help through access to education and guidance that comes from the wide range of experience gained by working for many different companies in different markets. The best educational experiences I have had were the ones that encouraged me to use a multidisciplinary approach across different classes. Don’t fear being over consulted; use your consulting team the same way.

Here’s one from the achieves. I was cleaning out some old folders on my computer and came across this Harvard Business Review post from 2010. I don’t typically keep these “top ten lists” (in this case top 12) as they usually are more fluff than substance but this list must have really resonated with me. I saved the list as a pdf and also started writing a post about it. As I look over the list from the perspective of a more experienced manager, an employee, and a person who has gone through some self-evaluations, it continues to resonate with me. I hope you find value in the list; the top ten have links to a full post where Robert Sutton expands on the topic. All are worth a read for new and experienced managers alike. We can all learn and all need to be reminded of our place in the world.

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well. 
6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too. 
10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
11. How I do things is as important as what I do. 
12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

Taken from 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Robert I. Sutton: https://hbr.org/2010/05/12-things-that-good-bosses-bel – Harvard Business Review, May 28, 2010.

It’s ok, I get it. Consultants sometimes get a bad rap. My business model is a little bit different from most consultants. Like others in the field, I offer advice on organizational structure, leadership development and coaching, process flow analysis, financial analysis, and business plan creation and review. The difference is that I also offer what I call fractional management solutions.

Fractional management (or interim management) solutions are geared towards companies at various stages in the lifecycle of a company:

Growing but not ready for a full-time CXO, Director, or Manager

In this stage, the owner has been doing it all for years and is at the point where they have identified what they don’t like to do. This can happen regardless of how long the company has been in business. Sometimes the company can feel like a start-up even though it’s been in business successfully for ten or even 20 years.

Typically, the owner wants to delegate either sales or operational management tasks. I have experience in both those positions and can help you by allowing you to focus on the part of the business you still enjoy. By working on a fractional or part-time basis, I also help you keep costs down as your company grows.

Ultimately, the plan is to develop the company so that you and the company are primed to enter Stage 2.

Ready to permanently fill the position

Everything from the current financial health of the company to your current workload and forecast indicate it’s time. These upper management positions aren’t easy to fill and the search for the right person can take months – months that you don’t have. It also takes more time to search for and screen applicants. You need someone to fill the seat immediately on an interim basis to help define the role or smooth the organizational transition,

I can help you groom someone internally that you have in mind for the position, or maybe there are a few people on staff but you’re not quite sure who to choose for the promotion. I can get to know your team, conduct interviews and reviews, and we can discuss the strengths of the different candidates.

Maybe you are searching for the right person from outside the company – bringing a new person into your company in a senior position can be stressful. Together with some of my network of providers, we will help you screen applicants to choose the right person based on personality, skills, and company cultural fit.

Need to scale back and no longer needs a full-time manager

Unfortunately, sometimes layoffs must happen. As a small business owner, this doesn’t mean that you have to go back to doing everything yourself. I can help share the managerial load with you and also work with your team to cross-train and delegate so that you become even stronger and more efficient than you were.

If your company is in one of these situations or you would like to discuss other ways I can help, contact me or schedule a free 30-minute call here.

This Post is based on something I wrote in 2015 and still holds true today…

A company is solvent when it has enough cash in the bank to pay bills as they come due. Banks (and other entities) that have loaned money to a company  periodically monitor the financial health of a business to ensure the business has sufficient cash flow to meet its debt obligations. Just because a business appears to be profitable does not guarantee its solvency. When a business does not have sufficient cash deposits or cash flow, or its level of debt to income is viewed as being too high, the bank may declare the company insolvent. Insolvency carries legal weight through a bankruptcy court and the company may be forced to cease its business operations and begin selling assets to pay off its debts.

The counterintuitive fact of insolvency is that even profitable companies may become insolvent. How can a company be profitable but not have the ability to pay its debts? Here is an example:

If company XYZ earns $200 a month and owes $150, it appears to be profitable. Let’s say the accounts receivable structure results in the receipt of $100 on the 5th of the month and $100 on the 20th of the month. If the company’s accounts payable of $150 is due on the 30th, there is no problem and XYZ is profitable and solvent. However, what happens if the $150 payment is due on the 15th of the month? XYZ has $100 but is insolvent (by $50) because it owes $150. XYZ can maintain solvency by getting a loan until it receives the next $100 payment five days later. The company repays the loan plus interest. XYZ’s profit for the month drops below $50 due to the interest payment. Maybe this means it can’t make rent or payroll obligations; maybe XYZ is ok for now.

Using the same example, what happens the next month if the money XYZ is supposed to receive on the 5th is delayed until after the 15th? In this case they owe $150 and will need an even bigger loan in order to remain solvent until XYZ receives the regular $100 payment on the 20th and hopefully also receives the past due amount in that time-frame as well. If the past-due money is not received, and the scheduled payment on the 20th is also delayed, things just became even worse. Now XYZ can’t repay the loan, can’t meet payroll or rent. XYZ also may not be able to order supplies or will order on “credit” which means they will owe even more money the following month. In the worst case scenario, XYZ’s lender decides the business is too risky, calls the loan due, takes the company to bankruptcy court and has the business effectively shut down.

Unfortunately this scenario happens frequently to businesses of all sizes.

Please understand the importance of cash flow and take the time to monitor it on a regular basis. Let me know if I can help review cash flow statements, income statements, balance sheets or any other financial reports. Depending on the complexity or severity of your situation, I may also suggest you work with a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) who can offer even more insight and help with your accounts payable and accounts receivable terms.