Guiding Growth

For my money, the best reg­u­larly sched­uled net­work­ing event in Day­ton is the Day­ton Cham­ber Break­fast Brief­ing.  Month after month, the series deliv­ers top notch speak­ers, attracts a great cross sec­tion of com­mu­nity lead­ers, and offers a chance to break bread and sip cof­fee while enjoy­ing the pic­turesque view from the top of the Ket­ter­ing Tower.  Admit­tedly I am biased, as I am on the com­mit­tee for this event.  Still, the rea­son I wanted to be on the com­mit­tee was pre­cisely because the event is so great. This past Fri­day, my feel­ings about the event were con­firmed yet again, as Joni Fed­ders, Pres­i­dent of Aileron, spoke to the crowd about the Fun­da­men­tals of Business.

For those who are not famil­iar with Aileron, it is the brain child of Clay Mathile — the entre­pre­neur who built the Iams Brand and later sold it to P&G.  He formed Aileron as a way to “help fuel pri­vate busi­ness and free enter­prise, pro­vid­ing busi­ness own­ers with the tools and sup­port they need to mature and suc­ceed.” The com­pany works with busi­ness own­ers to help them “lead and man­age their com­pa­nies, dri­ving growth, inno­va­tion and jobs.” The com­pany recently opened a new cam­pus north of Day­ton, where they con­duct sem­i­nars and offer busi­ness lead­ers a quiet place to think, plan, and create.

So, get­ting back to the Break­fast Brief­ing, Fed­ders speech was very con­cise, yet was full of valu­able infor­ma­tion.  She walked through the ele­ments of the basic model that Aileron uses to assess the health of a busi­ness.  I did my best to fever­ishly scratch out notes to cap­ture her thoughts.   Here are some key take-aways from her presentation:

Pro­fes­sional Man­age­ment — Aileron uses a term called “poof man­age­ment” to describe the nat­ural pro­gres­sion that often takes place as extremely tal­ented tech­ni­cal per­form­ers sud­denly find them­selves in man­age­r­ial roles.  Often that shift from doing to man­ag­ing can be difficult, and it is impor­tant to real­ize that great per­form­ers on one level are not always nat­ural managers.

Busi­ness Life Cycle - Accord­ing to Fed­ders, most busi­nesses fail because of poor man­age­ment.  She stressed the impor­tance of prop­erly align­ing the busi­ness with where it is in its life cycle.  Early on, busi­nesses tend to be more entre­pre­neur­ial — bounc­ing from oppor­tu­nity to oppor­tu­nity to pay the bills.  As time passes, man­age­ment should begin to focus on areas of exper­tise.  She empha­sized the impor­tance of estab­lish­ing a board of advis­ers from out­side of the firm to assist in this plan­ning on a quar­terly basis.  She sug­gested that these meet­ings should be at least 75% for­ward focused — with dis­cus­sion around work­ing on the busi­ness and not in the business.

Lead­er­ship — Joni dis­cussed the idea that a key func­tion of lead­er­ship should be to set the vision and then cre­ate an envi­ron­ment to move the busi­ness in that direc­tion.  She also stressed the impor­tance of lead­ing by exam­ple.  “If the lead­ers are late and sloppy, how do you think the employ­ees will behave?”  She went on to dis­cuss the idea that lead­ers should engage in con­tin­u­ous learn­ing, should be piv­otal in deter­min­ing strat­egy, and should ulti­mately serve as “Keeper of the Culture.”

Strat­egy — Fed­ders spoke about the impor­tance of uti­liz­ing a deci­sion mak­ing process that looked at the fol­low­ing: 1.) Real­ity — what are they pay­ing us for today  / tomor­row,  2.) Focus — Where is the mar­ket headed,  3.) Com­pe­tency — can we do it?     These ele­ments come together to build a frame­work for pro­duc­ing a suc­cess­ful strategy.

Mis­sion — She moved quickly through this point, but basi­cally it revolves around “what are you try­ing to accom­plish.”  It is impor­tant to cre­ate and inter­nal­ize a for­mal mis­sion so that every­one is clear as to what the ulti­mate goal should be.

Peo­ple Devel­op­ment — This goes much deeper than train­ing.  Fed­ders stated that this is really about engag­ing peo­ple, and empow­er­ing them to become bet­ter.  She asserted that this is key in cre­at­ing long term growth.

Cul­ture — “The way we do things around here.”  The idea of cul­ture is so impor­tant.  Joni spoke about both the stated cul­ture of poli­cies and pro­ce­dures as well as the actual cul­ture of norms and cus­toms.  Cul­ture should be a vis­i­ble trait, and can be a pow­er­ful way to dif­fer­en­ti­ate a com­pany from its competition.

Struc­ture — When speak­ing about this, Fed­ders sug­gested that struc­ture should very closely fol­low strat­egy.  It is the idea of cre­at­ing an org chart to match where the com­pany is plan­ning to go.  Then find­ing the right peo­ple to fill the boxes on the chart.

Con­trol — Lastly, Joni addressed the impor­tance of con­trol or mea­sure­ment.  She stressed the need to exam­ine the con­cepts of “are we doing waht we planned” and “is the mar­ket doing what we expected.”  Finally are the results in line with what we anticipated.

Joni then spent 20 min­utes answer­ing ques­tions from the crowd.  Her responses were both can­did and insight­ful.  This was one of the best Break­fast Brief­ings that I have been to, and I think that they are all excel­lent.  Joni Fed­ders did a great job of shar­ing infor­ma­tion about her busi­ness and pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion to help those who came improve their own businesses.

The next Break­fast Brief­ing is on Sep­tem­ber 12^th at the Ket­ter­ing Tower in Down­town Day­ton.  I hope to see you there.

Were you at the break­fast brief­ing?  What did you think?

Aileron – Meet­ing the life-long edu­ca­tional and devel­op­men­tal needs of entre­pre­neurs, busi­ness own­ers, and executives.