Articles in the Press

“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” — John B Bogart

ARTICLES PUBLISHED IN THE PRESS

1.”Why Startups Fail & What You Can Do To Succeed”
Published in Singapore’s Action Community for Entrepreneurship website http://ace.sg

Nov 2009

2. “Survive startup status by diving into sales, marketing”
Published in the Birmingham Business Journal, Nov 13, 2009

So you’ve started your own business. What are your motivations for doing so?

Perhaps you’ve been downsized and being unable to find a job in this economy is forcing you to start a business. Perhaps you’re tired of being an employee – you hate your boss, can’t stand your colleagues, don’t believe in your company’s goals – and think it’s time to leap into entrepreneurship. Or maybe you have an innovative product or service that you think might be the “next big thing” to take the world market by storm.

Whatever your motivation, starting a business is the easy part. According to the Small Business Administration, an estimated 627,200 businesses were birthed across America in 2008, while 595,600 businesses closed. Thirty percent of businesses fail within the first two years, while 50 percent survive five years.

Rather grim statistics. Yet why do startups fail and how can you ensure that your business is among the ones that survive and thrive?

Expecting quick success

It’s easy to be attracted to the idea that we should be successful if we’ve invested some time, money and energy into a business. For example, placing one advertisement or sending out one sales letter and expecting clients to pound at your door.

When quick success doesn’t happen, self-doubt arises, taking a stab at much-needed confidence, causing you to lose faith in your business.

To be a successful entrepreneur who makes it past the five-year mark takes resilience – the ability to turn around a bad situation, to profit from your mistakes and to bounce back from failure.

This mistake can be avoided by taking a 360-degree look at the steps needed to grow your business, implementing a well-researched plan and having enough financial reserves that last at least 18 months when you start a business.

Not applying sales/marketing fundamentals

Do you have a negative reaction to the word “sales”? Many entrepreneurs dread sales because of old images of “snake oil peddlers” – manipulative con artists who convince others to buy things they don’t need.

The reality is nothing happens until a sale is made. As such, the first fundamental is to have a healthy mindset about sales and marketing.

Other sales and marketing fundamentals, like having a target market, knowing who your ideal client is, having a sales process, the 80/20 rule (that 20 percent of your marketing activities will generate 80 percent of revenue), the seven-touch-or-more process prospects go through before becoming a customer, the need to have a marketing plan, the necessity to invest at least 10 percent of revenue in continued marketing may seem run-of-the-mill.

The truth? They are applied in businesses that succeed and are absent or sporadic in those that fail.

Some successful entrepreneurs may even go so far as to say a business owner’s main business is marketing and not the product or service they are offering. While you might not agree with this view, the point is: constantly exploring new marketing methods, testing them, repeating what works and discarding what doesn’t will ensure your business survives.

This mistake can be eliminated by mastering the sales and marketing fundamentals, really weaving them into your business and continually testing marketing methods. As always, strategies you’ll learn work only if you work them.

Not mastering the mental/emotional game

If running a successful business were as easy as knowing what to do and doing them, why aren’t there more successful business owners around? It’s usually because people haven’t mastered the inner game of winning in business.

To win, you must be aware of the types of behavior that are self-sabotaging, deal with them and hold on to your vision until the finish line. At the same time, you must continually nourish yourself by connecting to your belief in the success of your business and truly owning the difference your business is making on the world.

An example of self-sabotage is the inability or refusal to learn from your mistakes. It’s the tendency to repeat self-destructive behaviors even though you repeatedly end up being bumped in the head.

An entrepreneur I worked with was close to shutting his business down, because, like the previous business he started, he didn’t embrace sales and marketing and let sales dwindle until it was too late. He was avoiding the real issue – his discomfort with selling.

This mistake can be eradicated by budgeting for a coach like you would an accountant and having the coach assist you in uncovering your blind spots and developing an unstoppable mindset. “You can’t see what you can’t see” is the reason sports legends like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan work with their coaches.

A good coach not only can point out what you don’t know, but is probably one of few people who is 100 percent dedicated to your success. You are taking on the challenging, yet rewarding, entrepreneurship game after all and you deserve all the support you can get.

3. “Consult an executive coach to achieve strong leadership skills”
Published in the Birmingham Business Journal, May 16, 2008
Original title submitted: “Good Leadership — What’s Coaching Got To Do With It?”

By Duanna Pang-Dokland

For some managers and executives, being a leader is like a bumper-to-bumper crawl through an inferno with an occasional jolt into the next level of anguish.
To those executives, the meaning of good leadership seems to shift with the times, leaving them confused and uninspired.
What is good leadership, anyway? According to leadership experts, Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, decades of analysis have given us more than 850 definitions of leadership. Definitions reflect fads, fashions, political tides and academic trends. They don’t always reflect reality and sometimes they just represent nonsense and like love, leadership continued to be something every­one knew existed but nobody could define.
So, while we may not definitively state what good leadership is, we at least know that it is important because, according to Bennis, it accounts for about 15 percent of the success of any organization.
Despite the significance of good leader­ship, however, the reality is that most of us who lead have neither been formally trained in leadership, nor had good role models. So we lead as we were led. We wing it, and tend to do what comes naturally to us. But good leadership practice is often the opposite of the latter. For instance, it may come natu­rally to treat employees like they were your children, but it works better to treat them with adult respect, as yourmost precious resources for success.
Another element that is lacking in most managers but contributes significantly to leadership success is emotional intelligence. Popularized by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book “Emotional Intelligence,” it is now con­sidered the strongest indicator of success in the work world. The higher up you are in an organization, the more emotional intelli­gence (or understanding yourself and others, and managing yourself and others) deter­mines your leadership success, contributing as much as 80 to 90 percent to the equation.
So what is executive coaching? Coaching is the second-fastest growing profession in the world, rivaled only by information technol­ogy. Recently, the Harvard Business Review reported that business and executive coach­ing is worth $1 billion a year.
Two factors contribute to the popularity of the profession: the massive global eco­nomic restructuring since the 1980s and the personal development movement. In addi­tion, the demand for coaching is fueled by flattened management structures, shrinking talent pools and ineffective leadership.
In terms of return on investment, Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Dell, Boeing, Bristol Myers and Johnson & Johnson have all report ­ed experiencing positive ROI. Evidence from studies done by the Manchester Group and others shows that executive coaching brings an ROI of up to five times its investment.
The coaching process, as defined by the International Coach Federation, is partner­ing with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional poten­tial. So, it’s not about giving advice, because we learn from having been teenagers our­selves that human beings first reaction to advice is to resist it.
Why hire executive and business coaches, you might ask. Today, they are hired because stress and failure of executives has increased, executives face more frequent perfor­mance assess­ments, the old command and control style of leadership is out of sync with the younger, inner­-directed, collabor­ative and culturally diverse workforce; and the economic realities of short­-term financial suc­cess have placed enormous pres­sure on organizations.
And as for the impact of executive coach­ing on executives themselves, “Ungagged, Executives on Executive Coaching” in the Ivey Business Journal, reported that benefits executives experience include continuous one-on-one attention, expanded thinking through dialogue with a curious outsider, self awareness, personal accountability for development and just-in-time learning.
An additional benefit my clients often report is having a sounding board — an impartial confidante to talk with without having to worry about political implications or maneuvers.
So, the answer to the question about what coaching has to do with good leadership is undoubtedly: everything. This means man­agers who have their own coaches are usu­ally better leaders than those who don’t, mainly because these managers are consis­tently experiencing the benefits of coaching.
The other significant connection between good leadership and coaching is what is called “The Coach Manager” — a manager who takes a coaching approach to leadership. This is a manager who creates an environment of influence versus authority, self-responsibility versus being answerable or liable and inspired actions versus obliga­tions. His role is as a developer of people, where he believes in the potential and pos­sibility of each employee and assists his staff to achieve their professional and personal goals. A Coach Manager is one who capital­izes on his staffs’ strengths, while working around their weaknesses. He also seeks to lead his employees to come to their own “A­ha” moments, rather than constantly giving them advice or telling them what to do.
The impact of the coach approach to lead­ership is a more engaged and productive work force, who is, believe it or not, happy to go to work.
Now that is a paradigm worth shifting toward, wouldn’t you say?

It’s not every day that I wake up at 4 a.m.because I feel compelledto write a letter to The Birmingham News, but here are the two things that fueled my compulsion:
** First, the $200 laptop that students in Birmingham are receiving is actually designed by Swiss-born, San Francisco-based industrial designer Yves Behar. So, just because the laptop is sent to Third World countries as a non­profit initiative does not mean it isof inferior quality.
Behar is renowned for creatingutilitarian objects that often become design icons, such as the Herman Miller leaf lamp, the Birkenstock garden clog and so on. His client list includes BMW, Nike, Apple Inc., Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, just to name a few.
** Second, the photo of first-grader Tyris Pickett as featured inThe News was precious. The au­thentic joy he was experiencing when he received his XO laptop isthe reason some of us do what we do to make a difference in people’s lives.
In the end, it’s not about the politicians’ egos, which camp wonwhich argument or the list of things that are wrong with Bir­mingham or the world around us. It’s about the unadulterated joy someone experiences as a result of a positive change.
Imagine how different life would be if we all just focused on that.

QUOTED IN THE PRESS

1. “Strong first impression: Creating a resume that stands out”
The Birmingham News, June 14, 2009
By Jean M McLean Making a resume stand out is a new challenge in a market where workers are leaving one industry for another, seeking interviews outside their established fields.
Wallace calls an effective resume a concise, bulleted two-page “marketing brochure” that quantifies achievements, designed to “get an interview, not a job.”
“You should demonstrate why your skills would be an asset to any company,” said Duanna Pang-Dokland, certified business coach with Birmingham-based Igniting Possibilities. The company coaches clients on leadership, team-building and transitioning strategies, including resume writing.
Avoid industry jargon and acronyms, said Wallace and Pang-Dokland, since you should emphasize how skills developed in one industry can apply to another.
Each resume should be tailored to the opening.
Good resumes include job content and accomplishments, Pang-Dokland said. Action verbs (“directed, implemented, restructured”) are combined with specific results (“…reduced turnover by 30%”).
“A dull resume might say, I raised the level of sales,” said Pang-Dokland. “An effective resume might say, ‘I reversed negative sales trends, implementing employee training that raised sales 40%.’”
“The individual owns their skills,” said Wallace. “They must be able to effectively explain them, to tell their story.” She calls this a CIB, for Circumstance-Improvement-Benefit. The worker gives a short summary of the circumstance (low sales), the improvement (employee training) and the benefit (40% increase).
How far you go back depends upon your experience, said Pang-Dokland. A 45-year-old should focus on accomplishments within the past decade.
An insignificant short-term job needn’t be mentioned, said Wallace. Although you should never misrepresent anything, this is not an affidavit. It is a marketing tool. While older workers focus on leadership/management, younger workers might emphasize technical abilities.
Although a resume should include concise, basic information, “No one should have just one page,” said Wallace. The two-page document should emphasize accomplishments, with concise, action-packed results.
Sent before the resume, the teaser includes a brief, margin-to-margin introduction followed by two columned lists. The candidate lists the position requirements in bullets on the left, with his corresponding qualifications on the right. The result looks like a “T.”
Job seekers are emphasizing applicable and transferable skills, said Marlene Wallace, founder and president of Career Concepts, a Birmingham-based national career management firm.
One way to do that is to provide what Wallace describes as a “teaser” letter, comparing the position’s requirements with the applicant’s qualifications.

Years had passed since Neil Lyda embarked on what he thought was a career path that would lead him to the promised land of stability and security.
Lyda was like many individuals — he was in search of a career that was meaningful and full of potential to bring a better future.
But for Lyda, then a technology analyst for ADP, there was one major problem: He had spent 2,191 days of his life doing something he felt no passion for.
Surprisingly, Lyda was not alone at this pivotal point in his life. Many professionals in this region find themselves questioning their career paths — even when they’re at the top of their game.
For Lyda, he wanted a less rigid job, where he could think out­side the box more. He wanted to “create something and that feeling wouldn’t leave.”
Following the death of his father in 2004, he was inspired to find a path that allowed him to follow his dream of wanting to create and build businesses. So he switched careers and launched a tradeshow display company.
“After his death, I felt like there was nothing else holding me… I think I even felt a little reckless,” Lyda said.
Some friends and family questioned his decision.
“A lot of people thought, ‘Why are you leaving a stable job?”’ said Lyda. “I even had people telling me that I didn’t even know how to run a business. That may have been true, but I was determined to follow my passion.”
He soon realized his boldness came at a high price. He had to relin­quish the stability of health benefits and ended up with severe rheu­matoid arthritis. However, Lyda said he survived because he planned carefully and made good financial decisions during the process.
Despite the difficult journey, including the decision to drop his trade show business, he said he has found a career that suits him best — in insurance. Today, Lyda is a partner at Chandler Brothers Insurance Co., where he is building and creating a working environ­ment that follows along with his passion to run a business.
He has no regrets about the decision he made — and credits his success to help he received from a life coach.
With many professionals wanting to switch careers, the trend of turning to a life coach has caused a mini boom in the field of career coaching. Many are staying in the work force past traditional retire­ment age and looking for an opportunity to keep working at a differ­ent pace. Others are finding themselves tossed around by downsizing and globalization.
Coaches offer emotional and psychological support for those who may be experiencing some of the same things that Lyda faced when he decided to leave his career.
That’s what Duanna Pang-Dokland said she provides to her clients.
“One of the first things I do is listen to my clients’ stories,” said Pang-Dokland, a life coach who has assisted many individuals who felt they were going down the wrong career path.
Pang- Dokland, who coached Lyda before he became partner at his insurance agency, said many times a coach can simply help someone figure out if they just need a change in environment versus a change in careers. The key is answering whether or not the person would still be unhappy in another environment.
“Our behavior is shaped by the perception of things,” said Pang-­Dokland, who also changed careers from editing magazines. “So the key is to look at their environment and see how they fit.”
Pang-Dokland said it is important to be clear about the problem before any permanent changes are made. Also, open and honest com­munication is required with family and friends.
“If they want us to, we have group sessions with their families,” Pang-Dokland said. “The goal of the sessions is to explore how the family is going to adjust to the new arrangements.”
Pang-Dokland said she then works with clients to develop a plan to clearly outline what they expect from their new line of work. From that point, she and her clients figure out how to get there. While every situation is different, it can take a minimum of three to six months to work through the issues.

PASSION: Life coach can steer to new career

“We design every aspect of the new career,” she said.
Dave Buck, CEO of life coach company Coachville, said self-promotion also makes the process much easier.
“You have to have the courage to tell people, ‘This is who I am, and this is what I do,’” Buck said.
Buck said the biggest mistake people make when changing careers is failing to be assertive about their new goals. People should also remember that no matter their age, it is never too late to start venturing into other areas that could potentially make you happier.
“When you get the call, you have got to listen,” Buck said. “If something is bad, it’s bad no matter how old you are and in the end, you pay the price.”
But Buck said the additional self-knowledge that is attained after such a process makes taking the chance to change careers one that is not filled with guilt and stress.
His company provides training for coaches of all kinds, including sports. He said the objective is to help people train others to be better at the “game of life.” This includes making sure that people are making career choices that lead to happiness — and better productivity at work and home.

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