Five dollar … five dollar footlongs …

What started out as a single store promotion somewhat single-handedly help drive the Subway brand to new heights …

How?

A good overview here …

Note also that Subway continues to drive a number of initiatives in addition to the “$5 Footlong” strategy, something it must do in order to get millions of customers through its doors every day.

But the “pointy” end of the main driver initiative was something simple, something catchy and something that could be leveraged out to the entire Subway network.

Anything in that “formula” you could use in your own business?

Jodie Shaw

An interesting comparison …

I got a good question from the wife of a prospective practice owner the other day at one of our franchise Discovery Days at our office in Las Vegas.

She wondered why there weren’t more women Business Coaches in our system.

Coaching, she said, seems to be the perfect type of business for women, who typically are very effective in their communication styles and who can relate to a lot of different people and personalities in a lot of different situations.

Personally, I think being a great coach has a lot more to do with behaviors than it has to do with gender.

Currently, approximately 20% of all coaches in our system are women.

But let’s look at some numbers in a slightly different context … 

Today, women make up more than half of America’s labor force … but, as of last year, only 12 Fortune 500 companies and 25 Fortune 1000 companies had women CEOs or presidents.

Those numbers have been fairly consistent over the past ten years or so.

In 1998, some studies indicate that a mere 11.2% of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies were women, a percentage that peaked at more than 16.4% in 2005.

By 2008, this number fell to 15.7%.

For professional women with business experience, business coaching is a perfect professional services business.

Not only do women effectively relate to a wide range of clients and customers, they can be excellent drivers and implementers.

And in our system, some of our best coaches are in fact, women.

So while some could look at our system and say “only” 20% of our coaches are female, that average is in fact higher than the numbers of women in leadership position in corporate America.

And, unlike those “corporate” positions, the women Business Coaches in our system have the freedom to work towards a fee level they feel is appropriate for their own business and lifestyle, without being “capped” in terms of compensation, achievement or results.

Plus, the accolades they receive and the results they help others create can truly be called their “own.”

While women in business leadership roles still have a ways to go to equal their male counterparts, there are a lot of opportunities out there for women to achieve more in terms of income and recognition than they may have ever thought possible.

I’m proud to say business coaching – and ActionCOACH –  is one of them.

Jodie Shaw

Web video … starring your CEO?

Here’s an interesting take on how some savvy CEO’s are truly embracing technology and using video online to leverage their companies, sales … and yes, even their brands …

Read the article here …

Never before has it been easier to use technology to create multimedia platforms … and this is a great indication of how leaders at the top of their organizations see both the value and potential of this technology.

As a leader of your own organization (or team … or department) … how comfortable are you with this type of platform and technology?

If you are very comfortable with it … great!

What are you doing with it?

Can you leverage it for your organization the way these leaders have done it for theirs?

For those of you who are not so comfortable in this new media age … you need to find a way to get real comfortable with it really quickly, or find someone who can help you with the process and technical aspects of this media.

While new media and online media isn’t marketing nirvana … it’s pretty close.

In our own testing and measuring, the ROI we can generate from an online campaign is significantly higher than that of more traditional and conventional media.

Not to say you should ignore those media options.

You shouldn’t.

But you shouldn’t ignore what is going on in the new spaces, either.

In this case, ignorance isn’t bliss … and it will damage your business in the long-run.

Jodie Shaw

Oops! Huggies may have some messy diapers after all …

Saved this one for the end of the week …

Seems not everyone is impressed with Huggie’s new “take” on diapers.

Here’s a sample of some of the outrage …

And sample of the spot without commentary …

Of course, the PR on this type of thing can always be turned into a positive (and the “banned” Lane Bryant commercial was the subject of numerous news and talk show reports that showed the spot anyway).

Have a great weekend!

Jodie Shaw

Women in Leadership … Power in Numbers?

The International Women’s Forum was founded in the 1980’s to give women in positions of leadership a way to share knowledge, best practices and ideas.

Here’s some numbers that are interesting in terms of women in executive and leadership positions that the organization discovered in a survey several years ago …

(WARNING:  This may contradict your pre-conceived notions of commonly held statistics of women in the workplace) …

1) Women in leadership roles earn the same amount of money as their male counterparts (most studies show a substantial gap in earnings between the two).

2) Women in leadership roles have a higher overall household income than those of their male counterparts.

3) Women are more likely to use “transformational” leadership models in their leadership styles (meaning they are more likely than men to transform individual self-interests into the goals of the organization).

4) Women who describe themselves as “feminine” or “gender-neutral” report a higher rate of effectiveness than those who describe themselves as “masculine.”

5) Approximately 67% of women leaders are married (a higher percentage cited here than other studies, which report only 40% to 50% of women are married).

We hear so much about how women are slighted in leadership roles or who have hit the proverbial “glass ceiling” … I think the numbers above give a different perspective on the state of reality in the workplace for women versus conventional or accepted “knowledge.”

In the end, however, leadership challenges are the same for women as they are for men.

Is there a vision for the organization?

Are there resources to achieve that vision?

Is the proper team in place to reach an objective?

The difference, I think, is in how women and men see and approach these challenges.

What are your thoughts?

More on this in future posts …

JS

Leadership by the Numbers

What makes a good leader?

I ask because I have been tasked with leading more than 500 franchisees and their Master Licensees as part of our franchise system, and while I have my own thoughts on the subject, I’m always interested in different (and even opposing!) points of view.

In my business, effective leadership is driven by numbers … and I think for most business leaders, this is true.

Much like a publically-traded company, we run our business on quarterly, 90-day plans … and each department and team member is expected to deliver “on the numbers.”

We also teach our coaches to coach “to the numbers.”

Why?

Numbers are objective and concrete … and it’s hard to argue with the numbers.

Yes, you need to put numbers into context … but in the end, your bottom-line number (meaning your profit) needs to be positive, or else you’ll be out of business.

How can you start to lead “by the numbers”?

Start systemizing and creating metrics for your business and start to tie employee performance to those metrics.

For sales people, this could be a matrix of new leads, sales calls, customer meeting and closed sales.

For financial people, it could be percentage increases or decreases in time to get cash in the door, collections, receipts or some other metric tied to activity and the bottom-line.

What about “soft” areas such as HR or marketing?

You can still find ways to quantify activities.

Can your HR department find ways to increase performance and decrease turnover?

Can your marketing department produce a set number of pieces per quarter that generate new leads?

A bigger question … can you start to shift YOUR mindset to start working towards the “numbers” (even if you aren’t a “numbers person”)?

I’d say your business, your livelihood and the future of your team absolutely depends on a “numbers” mindset … and depends on your leadership to those specific numbers that drive your particular business.

So … do you know your numbers?

If you don’t … you’d better learn them.

If you do … start to share them with your team, so you can develop the metrics and a team-wide numbers mindset to drive your company in a single direction to more profit.

The benefit of this approach will not only be more profits, but a better understanding of your overall business and more accountability for each team member and department.

You’ll also have a better understanding of the Return on Investment (ROI) for your team … and the resources you have in your business.

More on this in future posts …

JS

Action Coaching: A different kind of stimulus … (Part 1)

Here’s an interesting take on the economy by former secretary of labor Robert Reich …

Reich’s Wall Street Journal Op/Ed …

It’s interesting to hear how a current economist and policy leader can be so myopic in his view and opinions on how to get the “jobs machine” going in the U.S.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve read the text and I find absolutely no mention in Mr. Reich’s column about the role of small business in a job-led recovery … or the ability of small business to create new and higher paying jobs.

Here’s another way to look at some of the numbers Mr. Reich has discussed …

While he points to “big business” showing profit at the expense of lower sales, he never mentions that
according to the most recent Small Business Association figures, “small business” actually accounts for for 99.7% of all businesses in the country.

This is a phenomenal figure, and translates into more than 27.2 million individual companies.

What would happen if each of these companies hired just one person this year?

Or, even if some of these companies are simply companies “on paper” or tax shelters … what if 10 million “legitimate” small businesses hired two new people this year?

I only make that distinction because some of Washington’s policy “experts” like to claim a majority of these “companies” are actually one-person firms with little revenue and no employees, the majority of today’s biggest businesses where once one-person operations with little revenue and no employees, operating (of all places) out of a dorm room.

Much like Michael Dell did years ago … right?

Anyway … REGARDLESS of the make-up of these companies … let’s consider a more conservative count of 10 million “legitimate” small businesses for a moment …

Just say 10% of THESE companies hired just two people over the next year. That means in one year, a single company has expanded its size by 200%, and added a total of 2 million jobs to the economy – a nice growth rate of more than 200,000 jobs per month.

Not quite up to Mr. Reich’s numbers … but pretty close … and we are making some pretty conservative estimates.

The other numbers Mr. Reich fails to mention are those involved in the business cycle.

Most U.S. recessions in the post-World War II era last an average of 10 months, followed by growth cycles that last an average of 50 months.

Coming out of those downturns, small business has always led the way – with entrepreneurs and innovators bucking convention to strike out on their own.

But this time, a series of obstacles, barriers and outright disincentives to ownership have clouded the future time-horizon for would-be entrepreneurs, making the risk of taking a risk more risky than ever before.

The new reality of “business” paying health care premiums takes on a new meaning when 99.7% of all businesses are small.

Talk of taking away tax credits and incentives to “businesses” means something different to a marketplace with a 99.7% saturation rate.

Policies that punish passing on the assets of “business” or the actual “business” to heirs has new consequences when it affects a percentage of the 99.7% of all of your tax-paying customers.

The flip side of risk is return, and many of the current owners I talk to and would-be owners see greater returns in other parts of the world than they do in the U.S.

In my native Australia, for example, the continuing (yet slower paced) growth in the Asia Pacific region has owners gearing up for the next growth phase; while in South America, the emerging, resource-based economies are still producing growth rates that are projected to significantly outpace the U.S. and Europe over the next decade.

Yet, while those countries with onerous restrictions have found ways to prosper in spite of the barrier and disincentives to success, the U.S. policy makers are bent on finding ways to make the country even more uncompetitive and returns to capital even less appealing.

Credit, for one thing, is still a major issue for the small business owner, who has had to resort to an underground and black-market style barter system with vendors, suppliers and even some customers to keep operations going.

But unlike the old western movies, the political class is not sending in help in the form of liquidity, marginal tax cuts, or credits for investment or innovation.

Instead, it is looking to impose higher tax rates, more regulation, more fees and more restrictions.

In Australia, this is called “cutting down the poppies,” meaning in order to equalize the size of all the poppies in the field, you take the tall ones down.

While that sounds great in theory, it’s one of the reasons our company moved headquarters to the U.S. in late 2004, thinking it was the best move we could have made.

Now, five years later, the surrounding business environment is starting to feel a little too much like home.

More on this tomorrow …

Jodie Shaw

Another CEO Blog?

Right!

So … you may not know me right now, but I’m hoping over the next weeks, months (and years!) we’ll start to develop a rapport about business, women in leadership, franchising and business coaching – the latter being the business I’ve promoted, strategically planned and led for the past five years.

I’m a huge fan and proponent of online media, web marketing, business and personal blogs and the like, so this seems to me the ideal medium to communicate and share with others my thoughts and perspectives … in a forum outside ActionCOACH’s more conventional forms of media.

So why another CEO blog?

A few things here I suppose …

First, I’m a relatively young Australian woman heading an organization that was previously led by the person who founded the company … so I think I have a somewhat unique and interesting perspective on business, leadership and how to aspire to a leadership position – and actually get there.

Second, I lead a very unique organization that is built around a very different idea about how business does – and should – work.

These ideas have not only helped me coach our network to greater success, they also help more than 15,000 businesses every week all over the world get more profits, more time for those company owners and better team members to help build better companies.

Third, I rose to the rank of CEO from the marketing department, a path that is a bit different from someone who spent their formative years in finance or operations.

Because of this, I think I have a different perspective on how a marketing “world view” in business is actually better and more oriented toward growth for an organization than one based on finance or operations.

I also think I have some different ideas on how marketing can drive both finance and operations better than those areas can drive marketing … (but, we can have some good back and forth on that one …)!

Fourth, I believe that profit is not only the most important thing in business, but it’s the only reason to be in business … and I can say right off the bat you will not hear many CEO’s make such a blatant statement about the need and value of profit, but after “being in the trenches” of small business for a number of years, nothing is more important (yet misunderstood) than the role of profit in business.

One of the things we pride ourselves on at ActionCOACH (and the main difference between our company and a conventional consulting company) is that we focus on business growth and profit as the ONLY way to grow a company, versus cutting expenses to the bone.

You can only ever cut so many expenses before you affect performance … but once you know “how” to grow your sales and profit margins, the sky really is the limit – for any business on the planet.

Finally, I don’t only believe … but I know as an absolute fact … that small-and-medium sized business is the driving engine and force of economic growth in any economy.

This is even true in heavily regulated and highly top-down oriented economies (Mexico being one example), where small business and the profit incentive is the only factor standing between a recession and complete economic collapse.

I think this is because there are certain people in any culture or marketplace (read:  small business owners and entrepreneurs) who have an innate (or yes, even learned) need to succeed … fueled by a desire and drive to produce a profit and the aspiration to build a better lifestyle for themselves and others.

This need that is found in a few benefits many … even those who are more comfortable with stability and “security” … and who are content just to have a job or live pay check-to-pay check (either in the public or private sector).

The dividends small business pays are incalculable … not only to owners of small business but to communities and countries in terms of employment, innovation … and yes, even taxes and other benefits (even health care!).

But that’s a rant (or a topic!) for another day … or week … and just one of the many I hope to explore through this blog and interaction with you.

It’s been an incredible journey to this point … and I hope you’ll join me as I share my thoughts on a very exciting world of global small business and a future that will prove very interesting for all of us …

Jodie Shaw
ActionCOACH CEO, USA and Canada