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About Robert Uhler

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So far Robert Uhler has created 48 blog entries.

The Best Client Service Advice

The best client service advice I ever received was given to me by a colleague 20 years my senior. I’ve always admired the quality and depth of his business relationships. His clients had a tendency to be demanding, but they were also his personal friends. One day, I asked him how he did it, and his answer stuck with me.  So, what was it?

His advice: Always work to get your client personally promoted to a higher job level, study what their bosses or organization value and then help your client deliver impressive on-target results.

Now, at first glance, one might say that this concept is no different than delivering the scope of work on time, on budget and with good quality, but nothing could really be further from the “promotion theory.” Over the years, I’ve found that my clients  get credit by solving issues or enhancing an image outside of the scope of work.

Finding the necessary characteristics that lend themselves to your client’s success takes work. You cannot initially be so direct, but by building a relationship and studying the way others get promoted, you can better understand the values of the individuals within the organization who are responsible for promoting.

For example, one project I worked on was relatively straightforward in scope, but I realized that my client’s boss wanted to be recognized in the industry for innovation. As a result, I wrote a technical paper on the project and convinced my client to jointly submit our paper into a professional conference. We then asked his boss to also co-author the piece, eventually convincing him to attend the conference and present it. It was no surprise that the boss thought it was a fantastic project and congratulated my client for a great piece of innovation. Now that’s getting your client promoted!

The final level in a great client relationship is when you become a trusted career advisor for your client for the rest of their career. Your relationship develops as you repeatedly aid them in obtaining promotions. They become your friend for life and will eventually reciprocate by helping you whenever they can. I don’t mean to infer that you are using or manipulating the relationship. Rather, over time you end up caring about the individual as you would a personal friend. You learn a lot about them–their fears, abilities, families and ambitions. It is a genuinely fun phase. Due to the amount of energy I have put into these relationships, I don’t feel that I am working for them, but rather, that I am working with them! The dynamic has changed from a business-only relationship to being long-term friends.

© 2017 Robert Uhler and THE UHLER GROUP.  All rights reserved.

The Importance of Reading Offices

When I first entered the consulting world in the mid-1970, there was a process in my company where new junior project managers were indoctrinated into the company’s client service culture. They didn’t learn this information via a class or some literature, rather, through on-the-job training. You would be paired with a more experienced project manager, who acted as your mentor and trainer for six months to a year. Your role as a junior project participant was not only to assist on assignments, working with others as a team, but also travel and meet clients with your mentor. Your role in these client visits was to stay quiet and observe how the senior colleague handled clients.

In this article, I want to share one of the invaluable lessons that I learned from this training experience, which has served me well throughout my career. I call the lesson: “reading a client’s office.” (Later in my career, as I became more senior, it led to reading my colleagues and employees’ offices.)

To learn this skill, you must visit a client in their personal office or space. As I was in the midst of this training, the car ride to the client’s office generally served as my preparation time from my senior colleague and the return trip was used as a debriefing. In the debriefing session, I was grilled on what I saw and was asked to think about what it meant in both developing a relationship and delivering the project. The practice forced me to become much more observant about my client’s personal life.

Your client’s office is a physical reflection of their value system, their points of pride, their interests and hobbies, their families, their accomplishments, their organizational idiosyncrasies and, in general, a window into who they truly are. Nothing could be more revealing to inform you, as to who your client really is, if you would just pay attention, observe and later, interpret. During my visits to clients, I was expected to memorize everything I could: pictures, diplomas, awards, trinkets, text and management books, positioning of the chairs or tables, tidiness of paperwork, children’s art, photographs, clocks and colors. All were there to display personal ‘pride’ or their interest in something, and were direct reflections of the person you visited.

One technique used by my senior mentor was to ‘buy time’ in the client’s office was to ask a question about something in the room, which was always unrelated to our business. This question might be something to the effect of: “Are those recent pictures of your kids?” or “You read Jim Collins’ ‘Good to Great.’ What did you think?” or “You went to Columbia University. What was a city school like?” Other questions could be, “Is that sailboat yours and do you still have it?” or “How old are your children now?” Questions like these caused the client to move from discussions purely about business, to conversations about their personal life and inner thoughts. It suddenly changed the formality of the relationship.

My mentor instructed me to keep a notebook to remind myself of what the client’s office looked like to serve as preparation for the next visit. The “debriefing” with my mentor started with him asking me to take five minutes of silence and write down in my notebook what physical things I remembered while it was still fresh in my mind. That would be followed by a quiz based on what he had noticed. Early on, I was amazed at the items he saw that went unnoticed by me. Over time these debriefings raised the bar relative to my observations.

Sometimes after we went back to our office, we would do some research on types of boats, schools, books and other items that were noticed while at the client’s office. This would arm us for a starting conversation point at the next meeting. We might even send an article or book that was tied to our earlier conversation, thanking the client for their time. It was very important that the accompanying explanation note was hand-written. Old-fashioned handwriting has much more impact than emails, especially today because so few people still do it.

I actually found training quite fun and it established more familiar and personal relationships with each client in a much shorter period of time. It also taught me how to present things in a format that would be most appealing to each individual client. Today, I can still describe some of my best clients’ offices. Due to my adding a personal touch to my business relationships, many have regarded me as a friend well after my professional assignment was completed.

Have you tried reading a client’s office before? Do it, and I feel confident it will change the level of your business relationship.

Also, think about training your new leaders by teaming them with older, more seasoned executives. This mentor training practice is used with law enforcement officers, restaurant wait staff and in many other service industries as their exclusive training method. It is quality teaching based on real world lessons learned rather than PowerPoint slides and manuals.

Dedicated to my two great client service mentors, the late Dr. Frank Grant and Murli Tolaney.

© 2017 Robert Uhler and THE UHLER GROUP. All rights reserved.

Weinstein’s Lesson

The newspapers are alive with increasing details about the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Although most will have a racy fascination for a case of celebrity downfall due to possible illegal and egregious behavior, I see it as a way to reinforce the business principles of an article I wrote several months ago entitled “The Stallion Dilemma.”

In “The Stallion Dilemma” I discussed the challenge of managing high performers who become vital to our business success, but lose their moral way. It is the issue supervisors face in managing egocentric subordinates who are good at business goal achievements but ever increasingly violate rules and ethical boundaries. The stallions feel “deserving” of behaviors not accepted within the boundaries of others, because of their success and the accolades of followers who depend on that success. The Stallion Dilemma is also about the gradualism of the slippery slope of decay when these inexcusable behaviors are not confronted early and firmly.

Weinstein was a very high performer for several decades. The success of a movie producer is dictated by their ability to raise capital from investors, gather the best talent, obtain the best scripts and create a box office anticipation of every next project. It is the power to get the best approach in a very competitive and high-risk environment. Admittedly, Weinstein’s track record as a producer is not in dispute. He was a stallion.

He also was an employee of a corporation that carried his name and of which the outside owners of the business were represented by a board of directors. The board’s duty was oversight of management and legality of its practices. As the details come out, it is apparent that the board was well aware for years of Harvey’s sexual abuse allegations from numerous young actors. Harvey’s behavior is reprehensible due to the amount of leverage he had over his victims. Many were attractive want-to-be actresses living three or four to an L.A. apartment, making a living off of restaurant tips while hoping to catch a break in the entertainment industry. There could not have been more vulnerable targets. The consequences of rejecting Weinstein’s advances could be fatal to a future career that many young women had sacrificed so much for.

It has been repeatedly reported that the Hollywood industry was long aware of Harvey’s reputation. They tolerated it, even continually honoring him for his business prowess. ‘Couch casting’ behavior has been around the Hollywood culture since the 1930s–Harvey was just a more extreme and modern version of that practice. Regardless, some of the same women who, at every recent Oscar presentation, righteously lecture the world relative to their advocacy of women’s and minorities’ rights turned a blind eye to Harvey’s egregious antics. Many whom were disgusted by his behavior may have been afraid to speak out due to his power. Many actors who had already ‘made it’ chose to avoid and ignore him. They all turned a blind eye to Harvey’s continued victimization of the next generation of younger females. It took the NYC news media to break a long-known story, not the Los Angles or entertainment press.

Harvey Weinstein is the “Stallion Dilemma” taken to the exposed extreme. We should all contemplate whether, as supervisors or boards, we are tolerating our own budding stallions that ever so gradually advance the seriousness of bad and immoral behavior while hiding under the appreciation from others for their business results. Have we established non-negotiable moral boundaries of our corporate culture or do those boundaries vary dependent on individual employee performance?

As I contemplate the situation I’m struck by three theories about this case that could be applied to others in the business world.

First, what difference would it have made to have a woman director on the Weinstein board? This is where diversity might have saved an enterprise risk crisis that will have catastrophically expensive results for reputation and profit of the company. In an industry where so many of the participants are female, why was the board comprised of all males?

Second, as time goes on, so do societal moral boundaries. What was accepted relative to women’s rights (or lack thereof) in the 1970s is not the same today. Intolerance of bullying and sexual abuse has advanced quite a way in recent years. Does this beg for the addition of some younger directors who are more in touch with this generation’s norms? Did Weinstein’s board lose its way because it was brought up in a different generation of tolerance?

Finally, was the Weinstein board a victim of lack of board turnover and excess of personal friendships, which resulted in gradual acceptance of Harvey’s immoral or illegal behavior as just an operational problem to overcome? Was the board built around an indispensable stallion? How much board rotation should we demand through term limitations to keep the boiling-frog syndrome from allowing us to lose our way?

As corporate leaders, this is food for thought.

© 2017 Robert Uhler and THE UHLER GROUP.  All rights reserved.

Budgets are Fake News

I reviewed another corporate budget last week and it reminded me how much I don’t like the activity. In my 40-year career I have probably reviewed, negotiated and approved 300+ budgets and have felt, in retrospect, like my teams wasted hours and hours of valuable time. I often ask companies what their philosophical accuracy of the percent of the budget they expect to achieve is, and I get answers from 75% to 100%. But never over 100%.

So, what is the real purpose of the budget?
Budgets DO NOT:

  • Pay any bills
  • Pay any bonuses
  • Buy down any debt or provide any additional capital
  • Add to stockholders’ equity
  • Have much to do with the services you sell that clients want.

 

A budget is a ‘one point in time’ mental exercise that involves draining emotional interactions and often subordinate gaming for the lowest acceptable number. Management teams struggle with different techniques of bottom-up or top-down styles in repeated iterations to derive desired results.

So why do we spend so much time (and energy) on budgets and their iterations? Isn’t this really a topic where IBM’s Newton (or computer automation) could do well without much distraction, to leave you to lend your attention to more important company activities?

If I were to automate anyone’s budget, this is the analog I would give Newton: Start with the last year’s gross revenues and increase them by the sum of the growth rate of last year’s industry competitors plus additional 5 %-points. So, if your industry competitors grew by 4%, the top line revenue would increase 9%. Why? First, in a labor-based business, you should get +3- to 4%-point growth just from annual cost of living salary increases. The logic being this revenue level is level of revenues you have to grow to in order to move up or stay even on the league tables.

Then I would move to overhead.

I would tell Newton that the last year’s variable overhead costs (insurance, fringe benefits, office space, holidays/vacations) would be scheduled to increase at the revenue increase rate less 3%-point, or 6% in this case. Why? Because there are many economies of scale and some of the added new revenue growth comes from less tenured people who can fit into our palatial offices without expansion. The backroom administrative fixed labor overhead (executive, accounting, legal, procurement, executive) would grow at half of the revenue growth rate because I would expect efficiencies in this area and would want to bring some of my growth to the bottom line by consistently having a lower overhead.

I would not budget for acquisitions, separating them between completely organic growth and acquired revenue. I would put the newly acquired revenue into next year’s starting budget.

That’s it! The resultant calculated profit would mathematically appear. Newton is smart and I am sure it could calculate it in five seconds for the value the budget adds. No meetings—just issue it.

So, what are often-heard reasons to spend tremendous time interacting on budgets?

Some companies budget just because of operational tradition and what they perceive as good corporate hygiene. They have never thought about the value—it is just an annual event.

Some companies view the budgets as an initial forecast, but then as the year proceeds they stop using it as a forecast because budgets aren’t supposed to change to meet reality. Most companies use both a starting budget and periodic forecasts during the year. So, the value of the budget evaporates during the year. (That being said, I was in a joint venture with a European entity that insisted on re-budgeting three times during one year. When I asked why, they said, “We get in trouble with the executives/board of our company if we are off-budget, so a periodic re-budgeting practice is essential for that not to happen!”)

Some companies use budgets to indirectly erase their past recent performance. They negotiate down to numbers that they think they are safe in attaining. This is like a football team convincing the coach at the start of the season that their field should be 90 yards long on offense as opposed to last year’s 100 yards.

Many companies use the budget as the annual target in which to base bonuses on. Now, that is really illogical because it has nothing to do with the relative competitive posture of the comparable industry. What is critical in business is your relative performance against competitors. Therefore, you should be incentivizing people to improve beyond your competitors. Plus, using the budget as the bonus hurdle promotes initial conservatism of goal setting rather than creating stretched or aspirational goals. It also disregards longer term rolling company performance trends by erasing the past history. A company can unknowingly shrink to death slowly over the years by resetting the starting point to the first day of each new fiscal year.

Now are there very good uses for a budget? YES, and I am being slightly tongue-in-cheek.  CFOs need them for banking and capital planning.  But in my experience the budget negotiating process is not in line with the distraction, time and emotional energy the effort takes. Let Newton produce the budget and take all the time your team won back to find out what your clients want. Get external and compare yourself with the top quartile of your competitors. Management’s overall job is to improve in the comparative ‘league tables of profitability.’

© 2017 Robert Uhler and THE UHLER GROUP.  All rights reserved.

A Destructive Start

 

Often when I see top leadership succession within companies, there seems to be an incredible urge to immediately execute one, or both, of two destructive things: Rebrand and Reorganize. Both create internal commotion that distracts from outside focus and usually, the company does not recover to full efficient functionality until about two years after the fact. Let’s look at each of these scenarios.

Rebranding: Often the new leader feels that they need to take charge and make an impact immediately. Changing brands is one way to say, “there is a new sheriff in town with better ideas than the last yahoos.’’ They claim the new brand will impart momentum, freshness and add strategic clarity. In reality, it is a psychological way to ‘mark their territory,’ like dogs to fire hydrants. It establishes the new leader applying new “varnish” at the expense of momentum of the enterprise.

The fact is that the real brand loyalty for a service company is not a logo or a color or a symbol, but instead the identification to the individual company representatives the clients depend on. Take that representative away and those clients are more likely to follow that person to the next company, rather than ogle and admire the new brand. Brand changes don’t make new clients; in fact, they create uncertainty in the clients’ eyes that then needs to be overcome. Internally, brands are more sacred and emotional. Changing the brand usually comes with more employee criticism than praise for the wasted transition costs and distraction of attention to more pressing internal—and client—issues.

In the product industries, there are countless cases where a product-based company has changed brands without much negative impact. But service companies are people and they are different. Service companies are about the retention of the client servers, regardless of the company’s brand.

Employees are not stupid and they usually see rebranding as an ego-driven folly of the top leader. Thus, the client servers that usually think the change is a waste of profits often leads to breaking their loyalty, resulting in increased turnover. Client server turnover is a killer for a service company. Rebranding is usually not a necessity, but when it occurs, it creates a great deal of wasted money and internal emotion, sometimes resulting in the loss of the organization’s best client servers.

Reorganizing: There are a great number of very valid reasons to reorganize. Reorganizations can align the power structure to a new set of strategic initiatives. They can create enough people shuffling to reduce internal anti-bodies caused by personal ownership to allow necessary cultural change to occur more easily. Often reorganizations are only designed to reduce structural overhead costs (while falsely painting them as the better optics of ‘strategic alignment’). They also can be used to purge subordinates that may be more aligned with the last leader. But the important takeaway is that reorganizations also set the company back two years before new efficiencies set in. Doing it only for the sake of letting the new CEO “take charge” is a huge mistake.

Here is the cycle: Reorganization planning is usually leaked to the rank and file well before the actual announcement. This creates insecurity and counter-lobbying. Both are detrimental to an outside customer focus. When the new organization is announced, there are winners and losers in the power structure. Reporting structures are often disrupted, leading to unwanted turnover. Many times, the reorganizations are diagram boxes, reporting lines and named leaders without the hard work of detail decision design. As a result, the first 18 months of a reorganization is trying to figure out by trial and error, who has the power to make decisions on what issues on a situation-by-situation basis. Matrix organizations add an exponentially disproportional level of complexity and confusion. There are a huge number of calls and meetings just to figure out how the new organization makes decisions. Some managers freeze in uncertainty; some managers overstep their intended authority. It always takes time to work out the decision rules that were perfectly clear in the previous organization. This work-out period phenomenon distracts from the revenue and profit generating market.

It is my experience that reorganizations in a service company go through three stages:

  1. a period of decision-making chaos and confusion while facing high turnover;
  2. a period of re-establishment of an external orientation after backlog dangerously falls;
  3. a period of stability and efficiency of the original intentions.

 

The cycle takes about two to 2 ½ years to move to the last phase. I have seen companies in the middle of this cycle reorganize a second time to solve the unintended flaws of the original design, which starts the cycle all over again.

Due to the damage of a reorganization’s impact during the workout period, it is unwise to do a reorganization more frequently than six or eight years. Even then, count on: two years in turmoil, four years in efficiency and two years where the inevitable problems start to become apparent, but not cost-effective enough to start the re-org cycle over.

The worse reason for a reorganization is for a new leader to take charge and gain a sense of loyalty by shuffling the deck to get loyal subordinates who owe their job to the new boss.

So, if you REALLY want to cripple a company for two years, do a rebranding and a reorganization at the same time!

Finally, writing this on Memorial Day, I was taken by a re-quote of a Wall Street Journal editorial: “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.” {Timothy Snyder}

We will always revere those generations of citizens that unselfishly gave their ultimate sacrifice for their country’s and family’s future. For me, on the several occasions each year that I visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., I reflect. The ground-depressed, V-shaped black granite walls list the 58,272 deaths and MIAs chronologically to their date of casualty. I always put my hands on slab 5-West, reflecting on my time there, and ask myself, “Why did fate spare me?” and “Did I do enough to keep some of them off of this wall?” From the beginning of hostile conflict, that is a combat survivor’s lament. They will always rest in honor.

© 2017 Robert Uhler and THE UHLER GROUP.  All rights reserved.

The “Leave Something” Rule

 

There are many great client relation tips in sales, but one of the best is, “Leave Something Behind (or soon thereafter).” Last year I wrote an article about how to “read a client’s office” to determine personal information about them but I never said what to do with it. “Leaving something behind” means that after the first visit, when you have had the opportunity to study the space and/or engage in client conversation, you always follow up that first visit by sending something relating to the personal background you discovered about that client. It could be a book, a research article, a magazine article, a small gift, a photograph—something small, but thoughtful. Send it with an old-fashioned handwritten note. It shows that you really listened and cared about what the client said.

The goal is to give you a memorable and personal point to pick up the next conversation with this individual where it left off in the last meeting. This symbolizes to the client that you not only listened, but were affected enough to continue thinking about them even after the meeting ended. Some time may have passed, but you remember where you left the discussion and are ready to re-engage. A physical reminder of your visit will linger long after your discussion. As you finish your second visit, study the office or that day’s conversation further to think about the third visit’s ‘leave behind.’ That’s right: it does not stop after the first visit.

I’ll give an example that occurred to me just the other day. I visited a well-known financial institute that I bank with, to review my investment portfolio. The meeting went fine and afterward, the senior officer of the bank joined us for lunch. During our time together this smooth executive asked about my hobbies and non-profit boards. I mentioned my affection for American history—especially the Civil War. He asked me if I knew of a friend of his in our town who had the same interests. I said I did not, and he talked about a recent book this friend had given him. Within 48 hours after our visit, the subject book arrived in the mail with a hand-written note saying how much he enjoyed our lunch. That is a superior client server! I will remember him for that book, and we will start with that topic when I see him next, although it had nothing to do with banking.

Now in adopting this technique, there are several rules relative to what not to leave behind.

  1. Obviously, you never leave a gift of such value that the client is uncomfortable or forced to make a judgment decision not to accept it. Having a client reject a gift is a disaster and reflects on your bad judgment.
  2. If you don’t know about the client’s gift rules, a good rule of thumb is to never give anything valued over $50, even if permissible. In my experience, most of my leave-behind gifts have been paper.
  3. The third rule is to avoid gifts with a logo on them, except in the case of a research paper. You do not want the client branded with “your” stuff or your company’s logo, especially in the eyes of his peers or subordinates. To be seen with paraphernalia covered in your company’s logo will be perceived as you ‘marking his space.’

 

Early in my relationships with clients, I would lean toward giving technical or business items. But as I got to know the client’s hobbies and interests, more personal items relating to those interests were left. The mementos serve to create a wonderful bridge and represent thoughtfulness. Many of my clients can still tell you some article, book or artifact I have given for “leave something” gifts.

My mother taught me to never come empty-handed to a dinner party, and I have extended that lesson to never go empty-handed to a repeat client meeting.

© 2017 Robert Uhler and THE UHLER GROUP.  All rights reserved.

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