Leadership Archives - New Paradigm Advisors

EBITDA or EBITDAC?

The term EBITDA is common practice in the financial world. The term is also frequently used by business owners, without a financial background, but do we really know what it stands for? EBITDA means Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization.

The term is used as the standard for the operational cash-flow a business generates over a certain period, without taking into account the financial result, taxes, exceptional income or expenses. As we talk about cash-flow the non-cash costs as depreciations and amortizations are also excluded.

But what about EBITDAC… Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, Amortization and Coronavirus?

How has the Coronavirus affected you, your employees, vendors, and customers? It is safe to say that at some level COVID-19 has impacted every business owner and their bottom line. As restrictions ease and we return to some level of normalcy, it’s important to look back and reflect on what learnings we can glean from this and how to prepare for the future.

As an EOS Implementer, I help companies focus on three timeless principles regardless of the circumstances. EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, is a complete set of simple concepts and practical tools that has helped thousands of entrepreneurs get what they want from their businesses. Implementing EOS will help you and your team get better at three things:

Vision—getting everyone in your organization 100% on the same page with where you’re going, and how you plan to get there. Does everyone in the organization know where you are going and how to get there? Is it clearly stated and communicated? You and your leadership team should articulate or refine your vision to reflect who you are, why you exist, what you do and where you are going. It gives you (and your company) a road map to follow.
Traction®—instilling focus, discipline, and accountability throughout the company so that everyone executes on that vision—every day. This is where he “rubber meets the road” and your strategy becomes actionable. Your people must focus on what needs to be done, you must have the necessary processes in place to act and then you should manage outcomes to get results.
Healthy—helping you (and your leaders) become a more cohesive, functional, healthy team. In the book, “The Advantage” by Patrick Lecioni, to be successful, you need to be both “smart” with strategy, marketing, finance and technology AND “healthy” with minimal politics and confusion, high morale and productivity, and low turnover. Are you building a culture that is healthy and helping you thrive?

In the midst of this pandemic, your problems and issues only get magnified. Don’t ignore them, recognize and address them. Once we are on the other side of this and you report EDITDAC, let us help you build a business that is ready for both the good times and bad times. A business that allows you the freedom to balance both work life and family life, increasing in value, and gives you a future to accomplish your dreams.

New Paradigm Advisors believes you deserve to enjoy the benefits of a profitable, growing and well-run business. We help you break out of the old way of doing things and attack the new economy with a renewed passion and focus. For more information about transitioning your business, please reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you.

Michael Visentine and The New Paradigm Advisors team

future, Leadership, Planning

Preparing to Open: What I Learned from My Daughter, Small Business Owner and Entrepreneur

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas announced the plan to re-open the State’s economy much to the excitement of many and much to the frustration of others. Those on the open list are really excited. Those on the delayed list…not so much. My daughter is one of the latter. She will have to wait another three weeks to open.

Christy, is a hair stylist and one of the 33 million small business owners that the government has yet to figure out are the real drivers of our economy.

After getting past her irritation at having to wait another three weeks, she already has her plan in place to ensure her clients’ safety and confidence when they come to her salon (making Dad, the business consultant, really proud). She’s thinking the way she should: “What should I be doing now to not just do business but to thrive in the next economy?”

Christy has created a handout to give to each of her clients when they arrive describing all the steps she’s taking to ensure their safety. It includes a list of the things she’s doing to keep the space and all of her brushes, combs and utensils clean. She’s already sent her existing clients this list along with some suggestions of things they can do to help. One request of them is to text her when they arrive at the salon and then stay in their car until they receive her return text that they are clear to come in. This helps avoid contact between clients.

This lady is thinking!

She’s putting herself into the future and asking: “Is this enough? What else can I do to make sure I can continue to do what I love? And do it regardless of what the economy is doing and, definitely, regardless of what the government is saying is being done.”

What about you? Is this your mindset? What are you doing and what can you be doing? Maybe you’re one of the many businesses who has benefited from the PPP or EIDL loans. Or maybe even from the expanded unemployment benefits program. Even so, there is a “now” and there is coming a “later.”

The government programs are a “now”. You are the “later.”

What’s your plan? Are you collaborating with your team and outside advisors in preparation? Is everyone aware of this planning? Do your employees, customers, and suppliers know what you’re doing to ensure their safety as they work with you?

Babe Ruth said: “Yesterday’s home run won’t win today’s game.” Are you still playing yesterday’s game with yesterday’s rules? My daughter sure isn’t. She’s fully into tomorrow’s game and how she’s going to be an active player.

As a leader, you’ve got it in you to be thinking of today’s game and tomorrow’s game and the new rules. If you need someone to collaborate with on the challenges of all of this, feel free to call me. I’m your fellow wayfarer in this.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re looking for a great stylist, let me know. I’ll hook you up!

Blessings my friends.

Leadership

Sharpen Your Tools

Is your calendar this week like mine? Loaded up with all kinds of webinars and on-line meetings. All of them seeming to be valuable and important. But how many of them will really help me? Why am I watching and participating in all of them?

This line of questioning causes me to reflect on a very important principle: “Take the time to sharpen your ax,” as the saying goes.

Or, in my case, my chisels. Let me explain.

Our History Sometimes Defines Us

I grew up working with my Dad and brother in my Dad’s woodworking shop. We had a lot of tools in that shop and, as you can imagine, most of them had to have sharp edges. None were sharper than our chisels. No tool required the sharpness of the chisel and the hand plane. The reason was simple: these were, generally, the last tools to touch the wood. They had to be sharp enough to do the job without a lot of force and they couldn’t leave any extraneous marks.

The Satisfaction of Sharp Tools

To this day, when I do any woodworking, there is nothing more satisfying, I’d even say spiritual, than using a sharp chisel or plane across a beautiful piece of wood. As the tool cuts there is a clean shaving and a sweet sound as that shaving comes off the wood. This can only happen with an extremely sharp and perfectly honed tool.

We learned how to properly sharpen our tools through a series of finer and finer grit stones and then through a stropping process that created super sharp edges. This, however, was not a one-time procedure. Every time we pulled a chisel out to use, we examined the blade, stropped it, and made sure it was ready for use. We never assumed that it was ready right out of the drawer. We were always testing the blades before they were used.

The Right Tool, Constantly Sharpened

You can’t do a job worthy of true craftsmanship if you don’t, first of all, use the right tool, and, second of all, make sure it’s sharp enough to use. Our leadership skills, our management skills, and our technical skills all have to be constantly sharpened. We can’t assume that they are as sharp today as when we first learned them or pulled them out of the box. All of these – let me correct that – some of these webinars and online training sessions offer us the opportunity to do that.

How About Now?

Right now is a great time to be honing your chisels, your skills. You can’t do everything that’s being offered. However, I’m willing to bet, just like me, you’ve been wanting to get better at something and just have never found the time or dedicated the time to learn that new skill. Well, since you’re not spending two hours a day commuting, how about spending that time getting sharp?

Consider All of Your “Tools”

Take the time to do it. As an extra benefit, you’ll be setting an example for your team. By your example, your team will see the benefits of learning something new and you’ll have a company full of sharp chisels ready to do their best.

Dave

(Updated from a blog post that initially appeared on January 13, 2018)

future, Leadership, Planning

What Now?

You are facing a downturn in the economy and business. What do you need to be doing right now?

Do you keep people or let them go?

What about your vendors and suppliers?

And what about your customers?

Consider the airline oxygen mask concept. Put your mask on first so you can ensure you’ll be able to help someone else get theirs on. You know this drill.

Your highest priority as a business owner is to protect the life and health of the company. Do everything you ethically can to keep the company alive. It’s like the federal government whose number one priority is to defend the country. It doesn’t matter how the economy and other parts of society are doing. If a foreign adversary attacks us and the government isn’t ready to defend us, then we all lose! Defend your company first!

Not your salary. Not your assets. And, unfortunately, not your employees.

Once you’re committed to this first priority, the decisions on everything else become clear. Notice I didn’t say easier. It’s clear what you must do to keep the company alive. Also be clear on the benefits of this commitment to all concerned once the crisis has passed:

Employees have an opportunity to find another job or to file for unemployment.
Vendors have someone they can collaborate with and possibly provide some temporary relief to in hopes of saving a valued and long-term customer.
Your best customers will be much more understanding than you think and quite possibly be willing to help.

Once the downturn is over and the company has survived, you can:

Hire back the people you laid off or new people.
Perhaps earn a favored customer status with your vendors.
Have customers who have a new respect for you and the company.

The real secret sauce here is to communicate with each of these groups. Go beyond just communicating. You must implement what we call the Three C’s:

Communicate
Collaborate
Cooperate

These are part of our Core Values here at New Paradigm Advisors. If you apply these three C’s to the situation, we can assure you that your stress level will go down. It won’t go away. However, it will go down. Apply the three C’s with your people, your customers, your advisors, and your vendors. You will be shocked, yet pleased, with the results.

Call or email us and let us know your experience. Let’s learn together.

Leadership

Staying Focused in Turbulent Times

I woke up this morning thinking of what I can do to deal with the current market and societal changes that are seriously impacting my business. Since I’m an early morning person (meaning I am most creative and engaged in the morning), I am flooded with “great” ideas. Some of these I’ve thought of before and some are brand new. And, for sure, they are all great ideas! So many to choose from – and all of them are distractions from what should be my main focus: to stay faithful to my main business plan.

This is a case of: “For every mile of road, there’s two miles of ditch.”

There are so many times and reasons when we as business leaders get distracted with great new ideas. But we have to be careful that those new ideas don’t pull us into the ditch. Someone once likened this to a NASCAR race. This idea of staying focused on our main thing. In a NASCAR race the cars are racing around the track at speeds exceeding 200 mph. This requires the drivers to stay super focused on the track and the cars around them. If they ever so briefly glance away toward the wall, that nano second of distraction at 200 mph can drive them right into the wall.

For almost 3 years now, we’ve been racing around the track of this economy at over 200 mph. Now we have this yellow maybe even red flag waving at us called the Coronavirus. It seems that we’re going from 200mph down to almost zero. But are we really? Is this the time to take our eyes off the track ahead and start worrying about the wall? No! As tempting as it is, we can’t stop to worry about where the wall is, or where the other cars are around us. We can’t take the luxury of this worry. To survive and position ourselves to thrive in this and the next phase, we must stay in the race and run it with renewed focus. How do we do it? Here’s some ideas. These are designed to get our eyes back on the track and driving our own race car. Nothing new or super creative here. Just good old fashioned staying focused on The Main Thing:

Assemble your key leadership for a focused analysis of what is happening in your market:
- What are your customers and vendors experiencing?
- How can you and your team proactively impact them?
- What are you currently reacting to that you can shift to a more proactive approach?
- Review how you service your customers in this new situation: what can you do to help them?
Seek counsel from your key corporate advisors:
- CPA
- Banker
- Insurance agent
- Financial advisor
- Attorney
- Corporate consultant.
If you are project based, meet with each of your clients and explore with them everything about the project with a fresh eye.
- What, if anything, needs to change?
- What do you anticipate are going to be the challenges to complete?
If you are product based, meet with your vendors and explore with them what they see as impacting the supply chain. From those discussions:
- What do you need to meet over with your primary customers?
In all cases, meet with your employees and let them know what the plan is! Their loyalty and commitment to you–and you to them– during this time is supremely important and critical. Keep them informed.

This is just a start. I’m sure you are already thinking along these lines and maybe beyond. My challenge to you remains: don’t get so creative that you lose your focus on the track ahead. Now is not the time to get distracted with a shiny thing.

Stay focused! You can do this!

Leadership

The Opposite of Servant Leadership: Power Leadership

We’ve discussed servant leadership at length, showed you examples and introduced you to experts. But to truly understand the concept, we should really discuss the opposite of this leadership concept.

Meet power leadership.

Leaders who use power as their main motivator, usually rely on negativism, fear and misdirection to guide or direct an organization the way they see fit. They typically are not collaborators or team players.

Power leaders tear down. They thrive in economic downturns because cutting, not adding, is what they do to shape an organization. By cutting budgets, costs and employees, they destroy morale, drain resources and reduce organizations to shells of themselves. They typically are short-term thinkers.

“Leadership is about vision and responsibility, not power.”—Seth Berkley

In the mirror, opposite the power leader, is a servant leader. Servant leaders build up, see downturns as opportunities, and do things up front and in a transparent fashion. To them, power is in the organization and its people and ideals, not in them.

The four elements of servant leadership are in direct opposition to power leadership:

Servant leaders put service before leadership and are focused outwardly; power leaders are focused inwardly.
Collaboration is central to servant leaders and relies on consideration of what others think; power leaders believe there is an “I” in team—them.
Mentorship is important to servant leaders as it helps grow the team and the organization; power leaders believe all starts and ends with them.
To be a servant leader, you must have foresight and that comes from listening; power leaders only listen to themselves.

Where do you begin to develop and build a culture of servant leadership? Start by looking within and taking stock of what you already have. And then consider enlisting the aid of a partner. We are here to help with skills assessments, systems and programs as well as one-on-one advice.

Call or contact us for more information on servant leadership.

The New Paradigm Advisors Team

Leadership

Servant Leadership: Turning the Organizational Chart Upside Down

We all know or have lived the in the typical power structure of an organization. It is all about what you can do for the boss in the current quarter. That is, serving the boss and, in turn, the company.

If you haven’t heard the term “servant leadership,” or, better yet, worked and lived in a servant leadership environment, we want to take a few minutes and expose you to this concept. With roots in both Eastern and Western cultures as far back as the 5th century BC. In more modern times, Robert Greenleaf is credited with furthering the concept with a 1971 essay, “The Servant as Leader.”

One of the most visible 21st century companies to build their culture around the concept is Southwest Airlines. Founder Herb Kelleher put employees first and it paid off for the airline in a highly engaged workforce with low turnover and high profitability.

“Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.”– Herb Kelleher

The “secret” is in putting the workforce first. That is, a leader serves his workers and they, in turn, serve the best interests of the company and the customers. By guiding instead of lording over employees, servant leaders gain an edge in performance.

It’s an active model of employee development rather than relying on the basic transactional model of employee-company.

Call or contact us for more information on servant leadership.

The New Paradigm Advisors Team

Leadership

Words of Wisdom from Live2Lead

Now that some time has passed, we can reflect on the mountain of content from the speakers at Live2Lead. Let’s take a moment and recap the highlights and the lessons from the day.

This list of guiding statements, tidbits and fresh ideas is actually quite helpful when put into the context of our daily lives. Gleaned from the speakers’ (John C. Maxwell, Chris Hogan, Rachel Hollis, Angela Ahrendts, and Marcus Buckingham) speeches that day, here are a number of memorable phrases:

Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
Hope is not a strategy.
Use the ACT approach—what will you Apply, Change or Teach—from new things you learn?
Connection with others is absolutely vital for success.
Old hurt brings new harm to a new day.
Trust, loyalty and unity are each a two-way street.
Work hard and have fun at the same time.
A culture is a living, breathing thing.
Mentor someone every day.
Turn off your head and turn on your heart.
Big isn’t good unless big does good.
Give 60, take 40 in everything.
Look for yourself last in the photo.
A leader doesn’t have two good days in a row.
Be authentic.
Show up.
Give people the tools to change their lives.
Focus on your self-awareness.
Study failure then invert it.
Love is space making.
Culture eats strategy for lunch.
Satisfaction creates energy.
If there is mist in the pulpit, there will be fog in the pews—be clear.
Measure what you manage.

This is quite a list to digest. No worries—over the next few months, New Paradigm Advisors will bring light and substance to many of these homilies and help you put them to good, substantial use.

And please plan on joining us for Live2Lead 2020 on October 20, 2020.

The New Paradigm Advisors’ Team

Leadership

Live2Lead: The Takeaways

The Live2Lead simulcast is stimulating in itself what with all of the thought-provoking speakers, including and starting with John C. Maxwell.

However, there is more to this day than just watching inspiring speakers on the big screen. It is about interaction with people you might or might not know. And a place you can develop and take away a plan of action.

That’s why New Paradigm Advisors has created an event-within-an-event for the afternoon.

The takeaway workshop is just that: a session that results in a tangible plan you can take back to you company and execute. With results. Now.

Led by Nancy Canada and Michael Visentine, the workshop is part roundtable and part interactive session. Nancy and Michael are both certified facilitators in key areas that support New Paradigm Advisors’ core offerings: Nancy is John C. Maxwell Certified and Michael an expert in implementing EOS®, the Entrepreneurial Operating System®.

In marrying the leadership skill development component of Maxwell with the systemized operational action of EOS, attendees will come away with several things of value, including:

A written 90-day action plan with a clear set of executable tactics and measurable objectives.
Substantive discussion with like-minded businesspeople who will be developing their similar plans alongside you during the session.
Valuable additions to your professional network (your tablemates).

There is something to be said for being an active learner after having spent the morning in a passive, but positive, learning mode watch great speakers.

Look at this day as a place where you show up to learn and depart with a plan.

For more information and where you can buy tickets, click this link. Use the code “kingdom” for a special discount.

One more thing: for those of you wanting to increase your visibility via social media, use the hashtags #beintheroom and #live2lead. See you on the 11^th.

The New Paradigm Advisors Team

Leadership

Live2Lead: John C. Maxwell and the Power of Leadership

“The best way a mentor can prepare another leader is to expose him or her to other great people.”–John C. Maxwell

Leadership is an acquired skill or “power.” When one sets out to learn the skills of leadership, amazing things happen. One is the human connection.

It is truly amazing what happens when you get a dialogue going between leaders.

That’s what we are doing by hosting and delivering Live 2 Lead to the Dallas business community. This program from John C. Maxwell, scheduled for Friday, October 11, is a closed-circuit television broadcast, live, from Atlanta. Hosted by John C. Maxwell, the morning simulcast will showcase some exceptional leaders from business, industry and media in short (30-minute segments) sharing their experiences and practical ideas.

Our host for the simulcast portion of the event is John C. Maxwell. Maxwell is the leader of the presenting organization, a best-selling author, coach and speaker who has sold over 30 million books.

A leadership expert, John has worked with the leaders of over 80 nations. He speaks annually to Fortune 500 companies and organizations as diverse as the National Football League and the United States Military Academy (West Point). Three of his books, “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,” and “Developing the Leader Within You,” have each sold more than a million copies.

Along with the other speakers, Marcus Buckingham, Angela Ahrendts, Rachel Hollis and Chris Hogan, Maxwell’s presentation will help attendees to understand leadership principles, add value to their communities and make new and meaningful connections.

You can read elsewhere on this site about the schedule and generalities of the program on Friday, October 11. While others around the country are showing and sharing the morning simulcast, it’s our afternoon program that will set ours apart.

The afternoon session is intended as a working program. Our own experts will help take the lessons and messages from the morning and help attendees develop specific action plans for their own growth and advancement.

Thanks for considering joining at the ACU Dallas Campus on Friday, October 11. It will be a day well spent.

For tickets, click here. It will be a day you won’t forget.

“As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. the first person I should try to change is me.”–John C. Maxwell

The New Paradigm Advisors Team